Known Bootlegger Along Rum Row example essay topic

In the early 1920's most of America regarded prohibition as a moral triumph and many Americans were eager to comply with the law. However some during this period saw the entry into the 1920's and Warren G. Harding's "Return to Normalcy" as a release from the patriotism and reform politics of WWI. Since the 18th amendment failed to make drinking a serious crime an illicit market began to form in response to growing demand (Clark 144). When prohibition first took effect saloons across the country shut their doors and closed down, but America was far from dry and by the mid 1920's hundreds of thousands of speakeasies were in full swing. Supplying the liquor to these illegal nightclubs were the bootleggers, enterprising businessmen in the informal economy of the time.

Although popular depiction in movies, literature, and TV has it that all the alcohol in the country ran from the hands of the gangland crime lords, that isn't really the case. Most of the alcohol came from independent bootleggers working for no one but themselves. Thus prohibition was not the foothold for organized crime in America that pop-culture has made it seem. On Midnight of January 16 1920 when nation wide prohibition officially came into effect little did the American people know that for the next 13 years they would be test subjects for one of most dismally failed experiments of all time. The so called "noble experiment" of prohibition would in time be looked upon by all not as any kind of "moral triumph", but as a miscalculation of epic proportions which allowed crime to flourish, the law to be openly flaunted by all echelons of society. Prohibition was undoubtedly a failure but did it really have the negative effects that many claim it had?

It created a highly lucrative informal economy presenting high rewards for anyone willing to risk breaking the poorly enforced law as put forth in the Volstead act. However it also destroyed thousands of legal jobs associated with alcohol and although not immediately apparent due to the situation in Europe at the time it created less of a market for corn than was available before the war. The informal economy created during the prohibition is to this day unrivaled in terms of volume and cash flow. It was also unprecedented as a free and open market accessible to anyone with the capital to begin except in those areas where it was Mafia dominated. As such it can not be said which would have been better for the people an informal economy of the bootleggers or a formal labor and service market.

Most of the leading bootleggers were young men whose background had excluded them from traditional crime organizations, such as the Mafia. While the majority of bootleggers were males in their twenties and thirties, there was a great diversity these entrepreneurs including women, both young and old, immigrants of Polish, Jewish, and other European descent as well as natural born Americans (Pegram 173). There are a few exceptions to the domination of the market by independent operators such as Chicago and to a lesser extent New York. In these cities liquor distribution and wholesaling was a crime syndicate monopoly. However except for the domestic produced beer and homebrew, or moonshine, most of the alcohol was brought in by independent bootleggers off of rum row (Bequai 34-36).

By the middle of the 1920's the weakness of the 18th amendment was well known and liquor began pouring over the borders in volume. Liquor was brought into the country by many methods but the most popular was overland from Canada, which only required luck and the trunk of a car, or by water. Bringing liquor in by sea was more dangerous, more difficult and more expensive, but it also gave more profit. Most of the liquor along the eastern seaboard was bought from rum row, the popular term for the line of ships that would drop anchor just outside of the three mile international water line and then sell their cargoes of illicit liquor, to smaller faster ships owned and operated by rum runners.

Bill McCoy, a well-known bootlegger along rum row, was known to make runs of five thousand cases at a time. Some ships carried even more liquor than McCoy such as the Sagatind, which was seized with 43,000 cases on board (Canney 1-7). Bootleggers catered to everyone everywhere, from the large cities with thousands of speakeasies to the small towns of rural America where the bootlegger was a kind of hero. Kelly Wage was a small town bootlegger in Illinois, where the townsfolk saw him a daring figure, resisting authority and gaining incredible success. In a town where most people owned a Ford Model T, Kelly owned three or four big touring cars. He lived in one of the nicest houses and was a friend to many of the residents (Hallwas 178-181).

In a big city, like Seattle, where there was more than just one bootlegger, there was always one bootlegger who would stand out among his peers. One such man was Roy Olmstead, he started out as a police lieutenant and with the inside knowledge he gained began a bootlegging operation of his own. As his business began to grow he recruited radio operators, scouts, sailors, engineers, accountants, and salesmen. He hired a fleet of ships and financed many automobiles; he sold better quality liquor at a cheaper price than his competition and soon began to expand his business even more (Clark 161-165). However Olmstead did not create a monopolistic crime syndicate the way that the Mafia did, if he didn't encourage competition at least he didn't gun it down. Many of the independent bootleggers in large cities began to expand this way, building a business' to rival the formal market economy of the time.

Most markets were dominated by independent operators in non-violent economic competition with each other. Two of the few exceptions to this were in Chicago and, to a somewhat lesser extent, New York. Both of the cities were largely gang run with some independent competition in New York and none in Chicago. It is Chicago from whence comes the misconception that the Mafia controlled all alcohol during prohibition. This was mostly due to the publicity attracted by Chicago gangland killings; these brutal slaughters during the beer wars made national news whereas the coast guard raids on independent bootleggers were never publicized. Another factor was the crackdown on Chicago gangsters by agent Elliot Ness who played up to publicity.

Similar crackdowns by agents across the country on smaller independent bootlegging operations went largely unnoticed by the public. This view was also popularized by Hollywood in the 1930's with movies like Scarface (1932) and Little Caesar (1930) (Cashman 204-214). It can easily be said that the amount of liquor moved by the Mafia is no where near that moved by independent operators. It may also be said that whereas the alcohol that the Mafia moved was watched, seized, and destroyed by the authorities, most of that moved by the independent operators was never even known about until after it was gone and sold. The Mafia played for the press and became the pop culture phenomenon of their time, influencing speech, entertainment and the formal economy as it is today. This cumulated in the impression still held by many today that at one point in history the Mafia controlled the flow of all alcohol in America.

Bequai, August. Organized Crime. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1979. Clark, Norman H. The Dry Years. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965. Canney, Donald L. Rum War: Prohibition and the U.S. Coast Guard., 1998.

Accessed 12 January, 2002 Cashman, Sean Dennis. Prohibition The Lie Of the Land. New York: The Free Press, 1981. Pegram, Thomas R. Battling Demon Rum. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998. Hallwas, John E. The Bootlegger.

Illinois: The Board Of trustees of The University of Illinois, 1998.