Here's Where It Gets Interesting - If Mabel Had Worn Trousers

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Today, we’re going to meet the most powerful woman in America during the Prohibition era. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the Assistant Attorney General and it was her job to enforce the 18th amendment and prosecute those who flouted the new laws of Prohibition. With a boss that didn’t think she’d succeed and a lazy department who didn’t want to work for a woman, Mabel went after some of the most notorious names in bootlegging… and won. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad to have you joining me today for episode three of our new series about prohibition. What a fascinating time in history. When 32-year-old Mabel Walker Willebrand arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1921, she met with President Warren G. Harding, and they made an impressive duo. Harding was tall and charming, and Mabel was bright-eyed and confident. Together, they sat and talked quietly for a while, and at the end of the conversation, President Harding looked at Mabel sternly and said, I see only one thing against you,

your youth. Mabel calmly replied to him, I promise to outgrow it, Mr. President. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Mabel got the job. She had officially been appointed as the U.S. Assistant Attorney General, or basically the chief legal enforcer of Prohibition, the sobriety czar of the entire United States. At the time, she was the most powerful woman in America and the most famous woman who wasn't a movie star. The New York Times called her one of the keenest legal minds in the United States. In the census of 1920, there were under 2,000 women in the U.S. Under 2,000 women in the U.S. categorized under lawyers, judges, and justices,

which made them just barely a drop in the bucket of the 8.2 million women who were in the workforce at the time. Under 2,000 out of more than 8 million women who worked outside the home. Mabel began her law career by taking on pro bono cases. As the first female public defender in Los Angeles, she changed court procedure, which was dominated by men, to allow women to give their testimonies before judges and juries. She argued over 2,000 them wasn't completely on principle. Most men were unwilling to have a female lawyer represent them and refused her as their defender. With her reputation on the rise, she began to provide counsel for a lot of women's rights organizations. But there was one big group that she'd never represented or even been a member of, the Women's Christian Temperance Union. We've talked a lot about them over the

first two episodes because they made a huge impact during the early days of temperance. But as their focus shifted towards women's voting rights, another organization began to fill the anti-liquor activism space. It was called the Anti-Saloon League. It all started at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin was known for its progressivism. It was the first co-ed university in the United States and was also the first to admit Black students. But even this progressive school took on

restrictive practices in an effort to embrace modern science and medical trends. Oberlin promoted healthy living through extremely strict dietary rules for their students, like no alcohol or caffeine or even meat. One Sunday morning in June of 1893, an Oberlin student named Wayne Wheeler attended services at the First Congregational Church led by the preacher Howard Hyde Russell, who also happened to be the founder of the Anti-Saloon League. And as Howard Russell spoke, he was preaching, it seemed, directly to Wayne Wheeler. Wayne already had a strong aversion to alcohol. Why? Because when he was a boy, a farmhand on his parents' land got drunk a farmhand on his parents' land got drunk and accidentally stabbed him with a pitchfork,

and that did him in. Alcohol was a no for the rest of his life. Wayne would become a boon to Reverend Russell's small but growing anti-saloon league. He was an incredibly competent, well-organized kind of guy. He understood the potential of creating a powerful political lobbying system that would influence the government towards temperance legislation. Temperance had many firm supporters with clashing ideologies. Booker T. Washington, who was a leading popular voice of Black America, was staunchly in favor of abstinence because he thought alcohol held back African Americans socially and economically. And then there was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and the violent racist group was very much in favor of prohibition because they feared that alcohol made Black American men lose control and harm their white

women. The temperance movement, first populated by praying housewives and black abolitionists in the 1800s, grew by leaps and bounds at the onset of the new century. But so did the beer industry. Massive waves of German immigrants into the U.S. created a growing desire for the beverage, and businesses like Anheuser-Busch were more than happy to satisfy those desires. Scientific developments like pasteurization and refrigerated rail cars made the distribution of beer infinitely easier. Cars made the distribution of beer infinitely easier. Before long, brewers owned or had controlling interests in 80% of the saloons in the country, which continued to serve as community centers for men. They were polling places and bank loan meeting centers and general hangouts to unwind and talk business.

But the money spent at town saloons didn't stay in local neighborhoods. Much of it went back to the brewers who then used that money to pad their own political influence. And it certainly didn't hurt that so much of the federal government's income, up to 60% at one point, y'all, 60% came directly from the taxation of alcohol. And at one point, y'all, 60% came directly from the taxation of alcohol. With so much money and politics involved, it wasn't long before conflict started brewing. On one side, we had the capital and influence of the brewers and distillers, plus the immigrant culture of big cities. And on the other sat the temperance movement backed by women, rural families, the religious, the formerly enslaved,

and a vigilante white supremacist mob. What a group to be in cahoots, right? American history is better than any fiction you could write. The Anti-Saloon League was fundamentally different from earlier temperance groups in that it changed tactics from moral persuasion to legislative coercion. The group was laser-focused on eradicating alcohol from American culture, and unlike the WCTU, they did not expand their programs to include other social justice issues. It was a group of white men who targeted other white men in ways that women and Black Americans just couldn't. The ASL did not care about anything that wasn't the prohibition amendment. They didn't care if you were a Democrat or you're a Republican or you were good for nothing or a decent person or even if you were a drinker. It was a yes or a no

black or white issue for them. Were you a man who would vote for temperance? If yes, get in the tent. If no, get out. Reverend Russell had built the Anti-Saloon League as a way to lean on politicians and when Wayne Wheeler joined the team, he made it his mission to carry it out. If you weren't on their temperance team, the ASL would ruin your political career, which in turn sent the message that other politicians should support the Anti-Saloon League, or they would be ruined too. It was the Anti-Saloon League who perfected single-issue political lobbying. It was the Anti-Saloon League who perfected single-issue political lobbying. In other words, as long as candidates backed dry laws and legislation, the ASL would back them. To do this, they relied on the financial support from the nation's churches.

By 1903, the League had active chapters in 35 states with a membership made up largely of evangelicals and mainline Protestants. They employed 250 people, mostly men, who kept in close connection with thousands of clergymen who had influence over their congregations. One Anti-Saloon League spokesperson said, I can dictate 20 letters to 20 men in 20 parts of the city and thereby set 50,000 men in action. They also worked directly with businesses to apply pressure, like when they got the Michigan Southern Railroad to announce that if the town of Collinwood, Ohio went dry, the railroad would enlarge its plant and create a slew of new jobs. So the men of Collinwood voted out the saloons. The ASL was so effective in its first few years that not a single favorable liquor bill was passed anywhere in the country, and by 1908, half the country lived in a dry community. By 1917,

23 states had declared themselves dry, and the remainder of politicians in America realized that they had better vote in line with the Anti-Saloon League, or they might lose their careers. In December of 1917, the 18th Amendment establishing the prohibition of alcohol in the United States was proposed and accepted by Congress in what was a largely bipartisan decision and sent on to the states for ratification. The 18th Amendment said that after one year from the ratification of this article, the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the importation thereof into or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. Basically, you weren't allowed to make, sell, or move intoxicating liquor.

The states started to quickly ratify the amendment. Mississippi was the first state to sign on January 7th, 1918, followed just a few days later by Virginia and Kentucky. And states continued to trickle in until January 16th, 1919, when Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify. And the 18th Amendment was added to the Constitution. In the end, only two states, by the way, Connecticut and Rhode Island, rejected the amendment. And so, prohibition became law. But remember, a massive portion of the federal government's income came directly from the taxation of alcohol, which made prohibition a big problem, unless there was something to replace it. And that replacement became the federal income tax. A few years earlier, Congress passed the 16th Amendment,

an amendment that let the federal government collect taxes on citizens' incomes. It settled the constitutional question of how to tax income, and by doing so, it helped pave the way for a federal temperance law. So if filing your taxes every year makes you want to pour yourself a drink, I guess you can think prohibition and revel in the irony. But the path from the 16th Amendment to the 18th Amendment was a bumpy one. Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as the 28th president on March 4th, 1913, just a month after the 16th Amendment was ratified.

And in the spring of 1917, President Wilson stood before Congress and asked them to go to war. Germany had been ignoring the United States' warnings to end their submarine warfare on merchant and passenger ships in international waters, which prompted our entrance into the First World War. Temperance and prohibition activists argued that a nation of drunkards wouldn't be able to win a war, and also that the grain should be used for food rather than alcohol. On the other hand, labor leaders asked Wilson not to take away the working men's beer. Rich people had private stashes of wine and liquor, but the average Joe had only the saloon. Wilson tried to compromise by signing a bill prohibiting the use of grain to make hard liquor, but allowing the production of wine and beer.

but allowing the production of wine and beer. While America fought World War I and had the support of many citizens on the home front, the battle for women's suffrage in the United States continued. A woman named Carrie Chase Davis wrote a letter to President Wilson and said to him, if we are good enough to hold first aid classes and to make surgical dressings for the army, aren't we good enough to vote? Wilson agreed, and he supported the 19th Amendment that Congress passed in 1919. The amendment read, the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. And the 19th Amendment was officially added to the Constitution after it was ratified by enough states on August 26th of 1920. But of the three amendments enacted during his tenure as president,

the 17th, which by the way, allowed citizens to vote directly for their senators, the 18th and 19th, none held more controversy than the one that prohibited the sale of alcohol. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio!

Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

Because prohibition began in Woodrow Wilson's administration, it's often assumed that he supported it. But frankly, Wilson enjoyed the occasional drink as much as the next person. He was a moderate when it came to temperance, and he hesitated to completely prohibit the sale of liquor. He opposed a federal law enforcing what he thought was a personal choice. Congress, on the other hand, pressured by the strong arm of the Anti-Saloon League, was overwhelmingly ready to enact prohibition. The entire country went dry on January 16, 1920. We know that the 18th Amendment banned all the production, sales, and distribution of alcohol.

Interestingly, what the 18th Amendment failed to do was clear up the fine print. It didn't define what was included in the phrase intoxicating liquors. Even the members of Congress weren't completely sure. Most of them assumed that they were banning hard liquor like whiskey or rum, but that wine and beer sales and consumption would continue. Wayne Wheeler, however, who had by then become the president of the Anti-Saloon League, wanted to leave no room for interpretation. So he led the charge to draft a tough enforcement act. That means a federal law that clarified the 18th Amendment. He chose Minnesota Representative Andrew Volstead, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to write the federal law that clarified the 18th Amendment. Volstead agreed with Wayne Wheeler

that the country was being ruined by its saloon culture and that morality could and should be legislated. So the National Prohibition Act, which was also called the Volstead Act, did what the 18th Amendment had missed. It strictly defined an intoxicating liquor as alcoholic drinks that contain more than 0.5% alcohol, 0.5. The act made it illegal to manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess any drink with more alcohol content than that. But just let me give you a little perspective here. A standard 12 ounce beer is 5% alcohol, not 0.5%. A 5-ounce glass of wine comes in at around 12% alcohol. And a one and a half ounce shot of spirits like whiskey is about 40% alcohol.

The Volstead Act put all of them well out of the limits. While drafting the act may have been an honor for Andrew Volstead at the time, as the years went on, he became the face of everything that began to go wrong with Prohibition. And what a face it was. Volstead's heavy brow, his sunken eyes, and his very substantial mustache all worked together to to say whatever you're doing. You better stop that right now. President Wilson didn't like the Volstead Act. He vetoed it and Congress overrode him. They overrode his veto and America officially entered the prohibition era. America officially entered the Prohibition era. Wayne Wheeler had won. Anti-German sentiment was at a high in 1919, mostly because of World War I,

but a broader nativism, which had always been present in the United States, began to flourish. Immigration was increasing, and many Americans grew worried about how it would change the face of their country. Citizens pressured the government to do something about it. Back in January of 1915, Congress had approved a bill that called for all immigrants over the age of 16 who were coming to the United States to take literacy tests. And it was a fairly popular bill because people were beginning to think that the U.S. was letting in too many immigrants and that these immigrants pushed natural-born citizens out of jobs. President Wilson vetoed that bill, but in February of 1917, Congress overrode his veto. The literacy test requirement of the Immigration Act passed. But a second part, the quota system, failed to pass at that time. One of the reasons it failed to pass was there was a massive need for people

to fight in World War I, and the U.S. government needed to persuade incoming immigrants to enlist and fight for their new country. But when the war ended and the need was gone, prejudice against immigrants flared again. The Catholicism of many new European immigrants who arrived from countries like Italy, Ireland, and Poland was pointed to as a sign of the supposed danger of the country's changing demographics. Many of the incoming immigrants were from parts of Europe that had not sent large numbers of people to the United States prior to then. And many of those immigrants were Catholic or Jewish. And to some people in the United States, this was a big problem. Some Protestant Americans felt that Catholics and Jews could never be, quote unquote, 100% American, that their allegiances were elsewhere, or that the fact

that they didn't practice Protestant Christianity meant that they could never fully integrate. Also supporting immigrant restrictions were believers in the supposed science of eugenics, which linked a person's national identity to their racial features. A passage in the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, once said that New York is becoming a sewer of nations, which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel. This rejuvenated the KKK. There are millions of members advocated for the preservation of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. The National Origins Act of 1924

allowed only 165,000 immigrants to enter the country each year, half the number that it previously allowed, and made it so that immigrants from certain regions, specifically Northern and Western Europe, were favored. The push was to keep America white, sober, and Protestant. And this is the world that Mabel Walker Willebrand stepped into as the new Assistant Attorney General of the United States. In the first years of the 1900s, Republicans moved much faster than the Democrats in terms of involving women in the politics of their party. By supporting women in their fight for suffrage and political inclusion, they appeared to be progressive believers in women's rights, with the hope that women would then feel obligated to side with them on legislative issues and candidates. By 1921, Mabel was the female face of the Republican Party in Los Angeles and became a party delegate. She admitted to having been a social drinker prior

to 1920, but as soon as prohibition became the law, she stopped drinking. Her attitude was, if that's the law, then that's what we're going to follow. She said, the 18th Amendment is doing one thing, which is of sobering importance. Which, by the way, that's a very good pun, Mabel. Good pun, sobering importance. She said, it's putting democracy on trial. It's testing whether this government can withstand the militant discontent of organized minorities. Therefore, as I see it, the struggle is not whether or not prohibition will survive, but whether the United States is equal to the task. Mabel was the second woman to be appointed as Assistant Attorney General. She was preceded by fellow California lawyer Annette Abbott Adams, who served a year long term right before Mabel. Part of Mabel's responsibility as the Assistant Attorney General was to enforce the 18th Amendment and prosecute those who broke the rules as outlined in the Volstead Act. Mabel met with her direct boss, Attorney General Harry Doherty, and got a sense of what her job and staff would look like. She was given three lawyers,

one secretary, and two typists, all men who'd never worked for a female boss before. She was told that in addition to her duties as Assistant Attorney General, she was also to act as a wholesome, mothering presence in the office. So let's all try to imagine how one might go about bringing a wholesome, mothering presence to the workplace. Was she required to bring homemade cookies every day? Was she supposed to hang her employees' particularly well-made spreadsheets on the break room refrigerator? This is a woman who had the ambition and credentials for the position.

She earned a law degree and ran a successful practice. She was nominated for and headed up LA's legal advisory board. She was recommended for the assistant attorney general position by her state senator and all of the judges in Southern California. Not a couple, all of them. But unfortunately, it quickly became clear to Mabel that she got this job in part because men didn't feel threatened by her. Even though she had left her deadbeat husband a few years earlier, she kept his name, continued to wear her wedding ring, and didn't divorce him for several more years. So what men saw was a young married woman who was working to earn fun money. And if that wasn't degrading enough, her appointors also hoped that she would fail at her job. The government

considered her a scapegoat. If she failed at her job, then it was no skin off their backs. They could blame it on the fact that she was a woman and not on the fact that the prohibition legislation was weak or challenging to uphold. It would prove only that women weren't up to the task of having important government jobs. But Mabel was having none of it. Knowing that nobody thought she could do the job fueled her determination to succeed. And by the way, I should mention that Warren G. Harding got elected president at the end of 1920 and took office at the beginning of 1921. Okay, thanks. Here is a huge shocker.

Mabel did her job well. And the only thing people cared about was how she looked when she did it. After she gave a speech to the Women's Bar Association in 1922, a newspaper reporter said she was a beautiful picture in a black spangled gown. A frustrated Mabel wrote to her parents and said, Why the devil did they have to put on that girly, girly tea party description every time they tell anything professional that a woman does? The concentration on her looks stung because Mabel had a secret. She spent an hour every morning styling her hair to cover a hearing aid. A decade earlier, she had suffered health setbacks that resulted

in hearing loss and a miscarriage. In the same letter to her parents, she wrote, the dread shadow of deafness all but submerges me. If I could use the intellectual energy, that extra attention and nerve and willpower that I always exert to even keep the drift of what's going on, what couldn't I do? It cuts so deeply to be thought stupid or appear so because you haven't heard. Despite the obstacles, Mabel got to work prosecuting prohibition violations and tax fraud, and the management and reform of federal prisons. Prohibition was only being enforced by a very small number of federal agents who were at the mercy of the local law officials. So Mabel said, give me the authority and let me have my pick of a few hundred men, and I'll make this country as dry as it is humanly possible to get. There's one way it can be done. Get at the source of

supply. I have no patience with going after the hip pocket and speakeasy cases individually. That's like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter. Her colleagues in the Justice and Treasury departments were no help. These were cabinet members who were President Harding's old drinking buddies, and who mostly disapproved of and disregarded the prohibition laws. Many of them had also been key investors in distilleries, and they were looking for back doorways to stay in business. Even Head Attorney General Doherty was getting rich by selling pardons, paroles, and protection to bootleggers. Mabel got to work replacing corrupt prohibition

agents with honest ones and openly stated, I refuse to believe that out of our 120 million people, it's impossible to find a few men who can't be bought. She lobbied hard to place a large flotilla of Navy and Coast Guard vessels to intercept smugglers off the Florida coast in a place known as Rum Row. And she managed to get the Treasury Department to help bring down two of the most notorious rum runners in the country, the Big Six, who ran out of Mobile, Alabama, and the Big Four, possibly the largest bootlegging ring in the United States that controlled the port of Savannah. As she got rid of ineffective prosecutors, she was openly criticized by her colleagues and called names like Prohibition Portia, Deborah of the Dries,

Prohibition Portia, Deborah of the Drys, and Mrs. Firebrand. But she persisted and brought to justice George Remus, a multimillionaire who was considered the king of the bootleggers, and we will talk more about him in an upcoming episode. During just one year from June 1924 to June 1925, Mabel's office prosecuted 48,734 prohibition-related cases and won nearly 40,000 convictions. In her time as Assistant Attorney General, she handled over 160,000 prohibition cases, with 278 of them going to the Supreme Court. And it was Mabel who came up with a successful plan to nab bootleggers, not through prohibition, but rather through income tax evasion, a tactic that would end up taking down the notorious mob boss Al Capone. the notorious mob boss Al Capone. Her boss, Harry Doherty, eventually conceded that Mabel, who was once a scapegoat, had risen well above the expectations he had set for her. He said, I'll put her up alongside any several men, and she still comes out ahead.

In a high-profile election during the 1928 presidential race, Mabel gave a speech to Methodist ministers in Ohio and encouraged them to campaign against Herbert Hoover's opponent, Al Smith. She told them, there are 2,000 pastors here. You have in your churches more than 600,000 members in Ohio alone. That is enough to swing the election. Those 600,000 have friends in other states. Write to them every day, and every ounce of your energy is needed to rouse the friends of prohibition to register and vote. It's a page taken right out of Wayne Wheeler's anti-saloon playbook. And Mabel's words hit their mark. They led to Hoover's election in 1928, with the New York Times conceding that no other woman has ever had such an impact on a presidential

election. Have you heard of this woman, by the way? Probably not, right? Here she is. No other woman has ever had such an impact on a presidential election. Mabel's hope was that President Hoover would appoint her as the new Attorney General. But as the support for the 18th Amendment began to wane, he instead gave the post to William DeWitt Mitchell, a man who took a more neutral approach on prohibition. After leaving politics in 1929, Mabel resumed her law career, reopening her private practice. Not one to sit still.

When Mabel was hired as the legal counsel for the Aviation Corporation, she went all in, earning her pilot's license and financially supporting young female pilots. She met Amelia Earhart and later helped sponsor her flight around the world. Her success didn't dim after the Prohibition era either. For over

20 years, between the 1930s and the 1950s, the former Assistant Attorney General was the legal counsel for the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood. She represented a slew of super famous film stars like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. When Mabel died of lung cancer in 1963, her friend, who was a judge who later became famous for his role in the Watergate trials, said, if Mabel had worn trousers, she could have been president. Mabel had worn trousers. She could have been president. Next time, we are going to set our sights on the man who was president,

the president who gave Mabel her job. Was Warren Harding one of the worst presidents in U.S. history? Possibly. But the scandals are so bad, they're good. Get your popcorn ready, and I'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button on the podcast platform of your choice. We also benefit so much

from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media. Thanks for being here and we'll see you again soon.