“The people of the United States will never make Uncle Sam a bartender,” Wheeler responded. Nor would they ever elect someone like Butler, a man “soaked in avarice and rum.” Law-abiding dry advocates represented the majority of Americans, Wheeler added. They would always reject being led by a representative of New York City, a den of “bootleggers, rum-runners, owners of speakeasy property, wet newspapers, underworld denizens, alcoholic slaves and personal liberty fanatics . . . Neither Nicholas Murray Butler nor any other apologist for the liquor crowd will ever occupy the White House.”
Butler, in his public response to Wheeler, sounded amused, maybe a little bored: “It sounds as if something had happened to trouble him.” But Wheeler and his allies—for the moment, at least—still wielded real political power. Butler did not gain the presidential nomination—it went to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who promised continued economic prosperity and endorsed Prohibition as an “experiment noble in purpose.”
Much later Hoover’s friends would reveal that the experiment had been a little too noble for Hoover, who regularly stopped by the Belgian embassy on his way home from Commerce. Since the embassy was technically on foreign soil, he could drink there legally and be guaranteed some very good-quality alcohol as well.
THE PATHOLOGISTS and chemists of the New York City medical examiner’s office viewed the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcohol as an act of betrayal. Handling an average of twelve thousand bodies a year, they were accustomed to unnecessary loss of life—nearly half of those corpses were the result of accident, suicide, or murder.
But they weren’t accustomed to having their national government adopt a policy known to kill people in droves. In the offices at Bellevue, their outrage crackled like a current in the air.
In January the usually reserved Gettler marched off to meet with the New York press, bearing pages of information on lives taken by poisoned alcohol. As always, Gettler said, money bought greater safety. The wellheeled clubbers, the wealthy lovers of jazz-flavored cocktails, could afford the pricey higher-quality alcohol on the market. Many of them routinely invited their bootleggers to parties, gaining some personal insurance against poisoning. But the poor could buy only the alcoholic dregs: nickel whiskey from the tenement stills, the Smoke cocktails of the Bowery, straight wood alcohol. More than anyone else, the city’s impoverished residents were paying the real price of Prohibition.
The statistics that Gettler delivered to city newspapers bore this out: in the year 1926 alone some twelve hundred in New York City had been sickened or blinded or both by drinking some form of industrial alcohol; another four hundred people had died, most of them from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Gas House district, Hell’s Kitchen, and like neighborhoods in the other boroughs. “The figures exceed the number who died from alcoholism in the days of the saloon,” he said, his sentences dry and cold with determination. “It is impossible to estimate the effect which this poisoned liquor has had on the nervous systems of those taking it and who are not made ill enough to be brought to the hospital for treatment. It is clear enough, however, that the liquor which contains enough poison to kill so many is slowly but surely killing many others.”
MAYOR JIMMY WALKER’S first response was that of any dedicated drinking man: “If I had a club I would hit on the head myself any man who sold poison liquor and I would not wait for a policeman.” His second was that of a mayor confronted with a public health crisis: he wanted a report. He wanted his chief medical examiner to give him a tally and evaluation of alcohol deaths in the city.
Charles Norris was never a man to miss a moment of opportunity.
His reply to Walker’s request, published in February, started small, using Bellevue Hospital as a case study. At the start of Prohibition doctors there had treated about a dozen cases of moonshine and wood alcohol poisoning every year. Maybe a fourth of them had been fatal. But in 1926 the hospital had treated 716 people for alcoholic hallucinations, blindness, and even paralysis due to poisoned alcohol. Sixty-one of those patients had died. And that figure didn’t include deaths due to chronic alcoholism—those had numbered 87 in 1918. In the current year of 1927, Norris predicted, based on January and February deaths, more than 700 city residents would drink themselves to death by year’s end. (He would be proved right.)
Not only were people drinking more under Prohibition, he said, but with full government complicity they were imbibing alcohol that hardly deserved the name. He and his staff had analyzed bottles from speakeasies and Smoke joints, from hip flasks found in the pockets of bodies on the street. Every drink contained methyl alcohol but they also found gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. No wonder the newest nickname for the stuff coming from the tenement stills and grocery store moonshiners was “white mule”: the clear liquid, it was said, left the drinker feeling kicked in the head.
“There is practically no pure whiskey available” anyplace in the city, Norris warned. “My opinion, based on actual experience of the medical examiner’s staff and myself, is that there is actually no Prohibition. All the people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now—provided they are still alive.”
THE NEW YORK PAPERS—those wet publications so despised by the Anti-Saloon League—promptly embraced Norris’s report as evidence of a government policy gone haywire. “Prohibition in this area is a complete failure,” the
Herald Tribune’
s editorial page declared, “enforcement a travesty, the public a victim of poisonous liquor.” Columnist Heywood Broun wrote in the
New York World
, “The Eighteenth is the only amendment which carries the death penalty.” And the
Evening World
described the federal government as a mass poisoner, noting that no administration had been more successful in “undermining the health of its own people.”
The impact of Norris’s report rippled outward beyond his city. U.S. Senator James Reed of Missouri told the
St. Louis Post
that the New York medical examiner had convinced him that Prohibition supporters were uncivilized: “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes.” The
St. Paul Pioneer Press
called the government “an accessory to murder when it uses deadly denaturants.” Even the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, which had supported the Eighteenth Amendment, said that sympathy for the cause did not mean “we wish to inflict punishment upon those who persist in violating Prohibition laws.”
And the
Chicago Tribune
put it like this:
Normally, no American government would engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch a counterfeiter. It would not put “Rough on Rats” on a cheese sandwich even to catch a mail robber. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the mails. It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.
Dry newspapers found Norris less persuasive. Alcohol killed thousands of people long before Prohibition was enacted, they pointed out. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?” asked Nebraska’s
Omaha Bee
. The
Springfield Republican
of southern Illinois dismissed the whole outcry as “wet propaganda.” And the
Pittsburgh Gazette Times
pointedly raised a question that puzzled even opponents of the law: why would people persist in drinking white mule and Smoke, paint shop hooch and bathtub gin, when they must know that it could kill them?
Didn’t the obstinate guzzler bear some responsibility? Wasn’t it possible that “the drinker himself is to blame for the ills that befall him as a result of his libations?” the Pittsburgh editors wrote plaintively.
AS THE BODIES piled up in the Bellevue morgue, Norris pondered that question himself. Why would anyone play Russian roulette with a glass of liquor? Why did people continue drinking the Borgia cocktails—as one politician called them—of Prohibition?
One reason, perhaps, was that speakeasy patrons didn’t appreciate the risk. They didn’t realize that the newest version of denatured alcohol was more dangerous than the wood-alcohol-laced whiskies they remembered, or the oldtime moonshine, smuggled over from Kentucky or Tennessee. The city’s drinkers had no reason to trust government warnings; they believed that the anti-alcohol administration was deliberately exaggerating the risks. This was partly true, of course, but unfortunately not entirely.
In 1923 German chemists had figured out how to make a synthetic methyl alcohol called methanol. The key was to put carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into an industrial pressure cooker and superheat the mixture to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was a near-perfect methyl alcohol. Synthetic methanol was extraordinarily pure and extremely cheap to make; within a couple years the wood alcohol factories were closing their doors, giving way to the new chemistry. In 1925 Norris issued a warning that German methanol was being sold on the streets of Manhattan for half the price of the old wood alcohol. It wasn’t hard to find, he added: “We use it in our automobile radiators and around the house in cleaning fluids, paints, insect sprays and beauty lotions. It is present in over two hundred articles of common household and industrial use.”
He hoped people would understand, he’d said, that the word “pure,” in this case, did not mean “safe.” In the case of methanol, it meant purely “poisonous.”
METHYL ALCOHOL had another confounding factor. It wasn’t one of those poisons, like cyanide, that could make one violently sick in a few minutes and kill in less than a quarter-hour. Drinking white mule didn’t feel like swallowing poison. Not at all. It felt like sharing a friendly drink on a corner, in a basement bar, giving the familiar buzzing sense of intoxication.
If a drinker cared to notice, the first difference between methyl and grain (ethyl) alcohol was in how long the buzz lasted. With methyl alcohol, the period of cheerful inebriation was shorter; the sensation of a hangover could come within an hour or two. If the dose was high enough, a few drinks rapidly led to headache, dizziness, nausea, a staggering lack of coordination, confusion, and finally an overpowering need to sleep. When Norris called methanol pure poison, he wasn’t exaggerating. The lethal undiluted dose was as little as two teaspoons for a child, perhaps a quarter cup for an adult man. That modest amount, far too often, was a direct path to blindness, followed by coma, followed by death.
Unlike the grain alcohol served before Prohibition, methyl (wood) alcohol is not easily broken down in the body. The enzymes in the liver that neatly dispatch ethyl alcohol struggle with methyl. As a result, the more poisonous version lingers in the system, simmers longer in the organs, and metabolizes away only slowly. And as it stews, it becomes more poisonous. The primary by-products of methyl alcohol in the human body, as chemists had discovered, are formaldehyde and formic acid.
Formaldehyde is a known irritant poison, capable of causing severe internal damage, and formic acid is equally destructive, best known to scientists as an essential part of the venom in bee stings. People poisoned by methyl alcohol would often seem to recover from that first bout of dizzy sickness, feel better while the alcohol was being metabolized, and then ten to thirty hours later be poisoned again by the breakdown products.
First, their vision would blur. The optic nerve and retina are acutely vulnerable to formic acid salts. The nerve, with its continual processing of images, runs in a high metabolic state, causing blood to circulate through it rapidly—which causes poison to be delivered there continuously. Autopsies often revealed a startling atrophy of the optic nerve area, the surrounding tissue swollen, bloody, and spongy. Methyl alcohol and its by-products caused similar damage in the parietal cortex, a region of the brain essential in processing vision. It concentrated as well in the hardworking lungs—the breakdown of pulmonary tissue was what usually killed people.
In an essay titled “Our Experiment in Extermination,” published in the
North American Review,
Norris mounted an even more pointed attack on government policy, this time taking his case directly to a national audience and directly mocking Hoover’s description of Prohibition as a “noble experiment.”
Like Gettler, Norris was particularly outraged by the punishment that the anti-alcohol laws had visited upon the poor. The really poisonous liquor, he wrote, was sold in low dives, funneled from backroom stills, and delivered by bootleggers “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff with a low grade of trade.” Of those killed by methyl alcohol, “only a fraction . . . come from the upper levels of thirsty society.” The protection offered to the wealthy, the powerful, the artists, and the politicians had helped give illegal alcohol a kind of high-life image, a dangerous seductive allure: “Prohibition has undoubtedly bred a glamour to surround alcohol . . . it permits the tanning and galvanizing of young stomachs and countenances young debauchery.”
Norris wasn’t opposed to cocktail parties or to members of the twenty-something set drinking in moderation. His concern was that new drinkers could no longer start lightly, beginning with a glass of wine or a friendly beer at the local pub. Everyone now had to start with the hard stuff because not much else was available. “Old and normal tastes for beer and wines must now be largely satisfied with deadlier intoxicants—doubly deadly intoxicants.”