Spirits of the past

Historical Society uncorks exhibit on Prohibition in Lansing

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Lansing-area hunters enjoy moonshine on the porch after a hunt, circa 1920s.

Courtesy Historical Society of Greater Lansing

Last week, as a frigid January passed its midpoint, a curious scene took place inside the front window of Lansing City Hall. The lobby Christmas tree was half-undressed. In its place, a couple of suspicious characters were assembling a still. As in “moonshine.”

They refused to explain where the still came from and couldn’t produce a license.

What, exactly, is going on at City Hall?

The Historical Society of Greater Lansing has pulled out the stoppers and mounted an eye-opening, 30-proof exhibit on the Prohibition era in Lansing.

The ax-shaped brooch honoring Carrie (Carry) Nation was probably handed out at a Lansing temperance party. The "Vote Dry" button dates from 1918.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse

The collection of photos, memorabilia, objects and documents commemorates the start of national Prohibition, Jan. 17, 1920, and kicks off a 12-month, cumulative exhibit, “Lansing Has Fun.” Next month, to mark Valentine’s Day, new items will delve into the theme of love and marriage. The exhibit will change each month, exploring different aspects of recreation in Lansing.

Of course, not everyone had fun during Prohibition. Some people went to prison.

“People’s lives were ruined. They went to jail; families broke up,” said Valerie Marvin, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing and co-organizer of the exhibit. “It wasn’t all flappers, parties, speakeasies and jazz.”

The story of Prohibition in Lansing, as told in the City Hall exhibit, may surprise some people. Ingham County was a hotbed of the temperance movement and an early adopter of prohibition laws, beginning in 1910. The origins, lore and unintended consequences of the “noble experiment” are all on view at City Hall.

Just don’t ask too many questions. One of the aforementioned suspicious characters said the still is from a private citizen who used it in the 1970s and 1980s and asked not to be named.

Petite ax

The crown jewel of the City Hall exhibit is a tiny mother-of-pearl broadax, distributed as a brooch pin at a Lansing temperance rally. The ax handle reads “Carry A Nation,” a play on the name of the most famous anti-booze crusader, Carrie Nation, famous for breaking up saloons with a hatchet.

When Nation stormed into Lansing for a May 1902 rally, 17 years before national Prohibition, public zeal to shutter saloons was already reaching its zenith in Ingham County.

A petite, bejeweled ax is the perfect emblem for the unlikely alliances and contradictions of Prohibition, a time of extreme moralizing — and extreme im-moralizing. The City Hall exhibit takes pains to show that women were on the leading edge of a two-sided ax.

“It’s the first time women were breaking the mold, going out and eating and drinking publicly,” Marvin said. “They were cutting their hair short, wearing scandalous clothes. People found out that they had knees.”

Photos of women and men together, swilling booze and dancing the night away, offer a glimpse into a world very different from the Victorian era that came before.

On the other hand, the temperance movement gathered steam in Ingham County, and across the nation, largely thanks to Victorian-era women whose knees seldom felt the breeze.

By the 1890s, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the leading organization of “dry” advocates, was a major political force in Lansing. The movement’s oomph came from women who wanted their husbands at home, providing for their families, not hanging around in saloons, drinking their paychecks.

The exhibit includes a photo of one of Lansing’s lesser known monuments: an ornate concrete water fountain honoring Frances Willard, head of the national Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It was first placed at the corner of Washington and Michigan avenues but was later moved to the Potter Park Zoo and then to Old Town. The fountain now sits in an arbor next to the Turner-Dodge House.

Temperance rhetoric was often tuned to the pitch of melodrama. The City Hall exhibit includes an advertisement for a “Golden Remedy” for alcoholism that can be slipped secretly into tea, coffee or food. The ad features a drawing of a man punching a woman in the face, holding a bottle in the other hand, with the caption “Gone mad from whiskey.”

The early, female-driven temperance movement had its share of self-righteous prudery, but the ax-wielding fanatic was only a part of the picture. A century ago, women had no right to vote, little chance at a meaningful job and all-but-nonexistent legal status. They were largely dependent on the intermittent tender mercies of men — sober or drunk. To many women, temperance was a wedge strategy for punching through the walls around them into a better life, using the tools at hand.

To fight off the temperance movement, saloon keepers handed out "good-fers," mostly good for a free drink or two. This token from the Louis Ehinger Bar in Lansing bears the image of Evelyn Nesbitt, the model, chorus girl, and famous "Girl in the Red Velvet Swing."
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse

The City Hall exhibit includes a poster for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s 1907 state convention, one of several held in Lansing. Another rare item is a dog-eared sheaf of hymns (“Pull for the Shore” and “Hold the Fort”) “selected by A. G. Mabee, the temperance reformer of Lansing, Mich.” A bouquet of the once-ubiquitous white ribbons, worn by Women’s Christian Temperance Union members, and red ribbons, worn by “reformed men,” are also on display.

The red ribbons weren’t mere tokens in Lansing. In 1877, a mass meeting and street parade, with Dr. Henry Reynolds of the Red Ribbon Movement as speaker, drew thousands. The New York Times reported a year later that the Lansing Red Ribbon Club had a membership of 1,200 men — in a city with about 1,850 voters.

Backed by big business

The seat of state government and a factory town, Lansing was an ideal epicenter for temperance. As the 19th century came to a close, the growth of industrial workshops and factories gave captains of industry good reason to fear the effects of liquor. Alcohol was blamed for slowing productivity, causing accidents, driving up employee turnover and pushing insurance bills sky high.

The 1890s saw the rise of a new, tightly organized proto-PAC, the Anti-Saloon League, with a paid staff and state headquarters in Lansing.

Robert Garrett, an archivist at the Library of Michigan, has studied the Prohibition era for more than a decade.

“Industrialists didn’t want their employees showing up drunk,” Garrett said. “It was a movement before that, but, by the 1890s, you get more money thrown behind it.”

The combination of Christian zeal, capitalist money and tight political organization was tough to beat.

In Lansing, Ransom Olds’ REO Motor Car Co. snooped on workers’ off-duty drinking and smoking habits. REO management backed Prohibition and hosted dry rallies at the south Lansing plant and clubhouse.

REO plant supervisor Richard H. Scott was the city’s leading prohibitionist, doubling as president of the Michigan Anti-Saloon League. Scott was so zealous that he even let temperance get in the way of profits. He didn’t sell REO trucks to brewers — even after 1933, when national Prohibition was over.

By the mid-1890s, Lansing’s original angry mayor, A.O. Bement, was cracking down on liquor any way he could, including relentless enforcement of ordinances restricting saloon hours.

Bement was a prototype of the new wave of male, industrial-age “dry” advocates. The Bement Co., a manufacturer of agricultural tools, was Lansing’s largest industrial firm in the 1890s with over 700 employees, the most of any firm in the city.

When saloon keepers met secretly to back Bement’s opponents in the next election, Bement got wind of the meeting and shot back that “an accurate tab” would be kept on bar fights and public drunkenness and warned barkeepers to keep order in their establishments or risk losing their licenses.

The leading edge of the league’s statewide — and nationwide — strategy was the “local option,” a referendum by which counties voted to become “dry” or “wet” for two-year periods. The Anti-Saloon League micromanaged a meticulous, precinct-by-precinct campaign. As the contentious 1910s went on, the league tracked individual voters’ likelihood of voting wet or dry.

Ingham County see-sawed over the local option, going dry in 1910, wet in 1912 and dry again in 1914. (Ingham was one of 20 Michigan counties that voted to go dry in 1910.)

By 1916, the red-hot debate drew the biggest voter turnout in Lansing’s history.

Engine maker Clarence Bement (one of A.O. Bement’s sons and industrial heirs) and other business leaders led a dry rally at the Franklin Avenue Presbyterian Church. REO’s Scott headed the Ingham County Local Option Committee.

“I defy anyone to point out one thing the city has lost by being dry,” Bement thundered. On the contrary, he argued, the city was “far more orderly” than it was when the bars were in business.

One of Lansing’s leading citizens, education pioneer and Progressive Party orator Henry R. Pattengill, spoke to a crowd at the REO plant, promising “a larger, livelier and lovelier Lansing.” REO executive Harris E. Thomas told the crowd that going back to a wet county would be “the worst thing that could happen to the large industries of Lansing.”

Liquor manufacturers funded the wet movement, while manufacturers of “other things except liquor” spent thousands to keep Ingham County dry, asserted a Lansing Press editorial. The editorial praised Lansing workers as among the best producers and best paid in the state, “because it is inconvenient to get drunk.”

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Distillery breath

The City Hall exhibit is short on artifacts from the wet side of the Prohibition debate, but there are a few. Among the most interesting and beautiful are large, rare medallions called “good-fers,” handed out on the streets by saloonkeepers. The medallions, distributed by the Louis Ehinger Bar in Lansing, are emblazoned with eye-catching images of gorgeous women and “good for 10 cents in trade.” One of the medallions bears an alluring image of Evelyn Nesbit, the model, chorus girl and star of “The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.”

Reason, as well as sex and free booze, was brought to bear on the wet side.

The leading anti-Prohibition organization, the Liberty League, invited a Congregationalist minister, Wallace M. Short, to speak in Lansing in the run-up to the 1916 election. “Speaking as a Christian and an American citizen,” Short told the group Prohibition was the “wrong means of achieving temperance.” Former Sen. Edgar F. Hansen of Maine told the Lansing group that in his home state, every saloon that closed resulted in “a dozen blind pigs, speakeasies and blind tigers.”

On March 31, 1916, a major public debate on renewal of the local option, pitting Pattengill against a wet congressman from Iowa, drew 3,300 people to Prudden Auditorium.

Reporter Aleta Estes Munger of the Lansing Press wrote a first-person account that sparked a lot of discussion in Lansing.

“I did a daring thing last night, at least in the opinion of the mere men on the office staff,” Munger wrote.

A few days earlier, Munger had told her editor that thanks to the local option, it was safe for a woman to walk alone in Lansing at night. She was assigned to do just that and report the results.

The Downey Hotel bar in downtown Lansing, seen here circa 1920, with no women in sight. Prohibition brought women into speakeasies, drinking and dancing in the company of men — the opposite of the law's intended effect.
Courtesy Historical Society of Greater Lansing

Munger wrote that she went to the Hotel Wentworth on West Michigan Avenue, “where saloons once filled the air with horrible smells and filled the sidewalks with leering, bleary men who made remarks and spit tobacco juice on the sidewalks.” She rode the streetcar, went to the Orpheum Theater and found many unescorted women, sitting “quite indiscriminately, without the fear that a man with a distillery breath is going to sit next to us and make himself obnoxious.”

She found the business district quiet after 10 p.m., “the hour when formerly men came reeling along the sidewalks, swearing and cursing, sometimes fighting.”

The vote was a crushing defeat for the wets, who lost every precinct. In East Lansing, the wets got 78 votes out of 318 cast.

Statewide prohibition followed in 1918. By the time national prohibition was ratified in 1920, there were no saloons left to close in Ingham County.

A nation of criminals

Every history of Prohibition includes the cliché that it’s easier to pass dry laws than enforce them. Some clichés are true.

It was a full-time job to track down bootleggers in 1920. It’s even harder to locate a den of illicit booze nearly a century later. Marvin and the Historical Society team have yet to pin down a reliable location for a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Lansing. Garrett, at the state archives, has had no luck either.

“I wish I knew where they were,” Garrett said. “They didn’t advertise in the paper.”

“Speakeasies were supposed to be secret, and they were very well kept,” Marvin said. “They were known by word of mouth. We’d love to hear if anyone has any stories.”

One spot close to Lansing was almost surely a haven for strong spirits. In the middle of Pine Lake, now Lake Lansing, stood the Isser, a gentlemen’s club on stilts, where leading citizens relaxed and imbibed liquor. The club allegedly had a false floor in case of a raid. The club can be seen in a blurry photograph at the City Hall exhibit, with two young girls blithely rowing past.

It’s often said the Prohibition turned half the nation into criminals. The City Hall exhibit has its fair share of photographs of cops breaking up stills and posing with contraband.

The description of Lansing in the Prohibition era from Patricia Heyden’s “Behind the Badge: A History of the Lansing Police Dept.,” reads like a scene from “The Untouchables.”

“The period between 1917 to 1933 in Lansing brought widespread defiance of law and order never before experienced by the city,” Heyden wrote. “Racketeering, gambling, bootlegging, and other forms of vice could be found in Lansing from the corner barbershop to the back rooms of businesses.

The Lansing Brewing Co., on the corner of Turner and Clinton streets, was in business between 1898 and 1914.
Courtesy Historical Society of Greater Lansing

Contrast that hyperbolic description with Richard Frazier’s “Legal History of Ingham County, Mich.,” published in 1997:

“Ingham County weathered the storm without experiencing the racketeering, extortion, kidnapping and murder that occurred in some parts of the country.”

However, Frazier also writes that police “had a field day” raiding bootleggers, “and the raids provided some lawyers with work. … Some operators, of course, would pay their fines and be back in business within hours.”

Special “dry squads” of Lansing police, assigned to close down bootleggers, made hundreds of raids yearly. Heyden writes that violations of liquor laws “filled the courtrooms seven days a week” and “juries were returning verdicts in 10 minutes.”

A case study in Heyden’s history tells of two officers walking up to a Lansing house, going onto the front porch, looking through the window and observing “a man drinking with two other males in the house.” The drinking man was found guilty, but was granted a second hearing on the grounds that the cops were trespassing. At the second trial, the judge admitted all the evidence and the defendant ended up in an Ionia reformatory.

According to Heyden, Alfred Seymour, who served as Lansing police chief from 1918 to 1938, made the following comment: “When the prohibition law went into effect, we didn’t bother with search warrants, we just went in and got the liquor. Then they raised a holler about homes being invaded. I thought it was all right as long as we got rid of the liquor.”

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The ghost of Round Lake

Any history of Prohibition in Lansing has to address the persistent story that Al Capone laid low at Round Lake, about 60 miles from Lansing, conveniently located between Detroit and Chicago. The story has been passed down by locals and out-of-towners alike. Paul Grescowle, the proprietor of the recently closed Emil’s Restaurant in Lansing and grandson of the restaurant’s founder, said Capone liked to stop at Emil’s on bootlegging runs from Detroit to Grand Rapids to Chicago.

“He was very polite, he just liked his pasta and was infatuated with Coca-Cola,” Grescowle said at a local history event at Allen Market Place in 2014. “There was one table where he had to sit at, whether there were people there or not, so he could have his back against the wall.”

A 2010 biography by Toronto writer Nate Hendley has Capone spending the summer of 1926 near Lansing, “while 300 police officers combed the nation for him.”

Hendley may have gotten his information from an operatic passage in Laurence Bergreen’s 1994 Capone biography, “Capone: The Man and the Era,” which describes Capone’s alleged 1926 idyll at Round Lake in vivid detail — perhaps too vivid.

Lansing, Bergreen wrote, was a “checkpoint and clearinghouse for much of the Capone organization’s imported, high-class alcohol” on its way from Ontario, via the Detroit River, to Chicago and farther west. (Robert Garrett of the Library of Michigan, however, said he has seen no evidence this was true.)

According to Bergreen, Capone had an associate in Lansing, a young family man he calls “Angelo,” who settled in Lansing to escape the violence, crowding and anti-Italian prejudice of Chicago. Angelo ran a fruit and vegetable market at 120 S. Washington Ave. and let Capone use the market as a front for his bootlegging operations. He did Capone a bigger favor in 1926 by sheltering him while he fled from a Chicago murder rap.

Lansing police confiscate illegal liquor in a photo dated about 1930. "Dry squads" were diverted from patrol duty to chase down bootleggers.
Photo by B. Leavenworth, courtesy Historical Society of Greater Lansing

"Capone became a fixture in Lansing in the summer of 1926 and four subsequent summers,” Bergreen wrote.

According to Bergreen, Capone’s two enforcers, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn and Frank “the Enforcer” Nitti, joined him at Round Lake, and dapper Capone sent his Lansing errand boy, “Anthony Russo,” into Lansing for expensive socks and $150 silk shirts.

Bergreen also alleges that Lansing police chief John O’Brien was paid for keeping quiet about Capone’s whereabouts.

As Capone became more comfortable in Lansing, he moved about the city “freely and openly,” even taking a suite at the Downey Hotel downtown, but he lived most of the time with Angelo and his family in their house on Saginaw Street.

It’s an appealing story. Bergreen has Capone taking kids out for ice cream, buying stacks of 78 rpm Enrico Caruso opera records, greeting well-wishers on downtown walks. Capone is credited with protecting local business owners from the Black Hand, Italian blackmailers who preyed on other Italians.

As a closing aria, Bergreen maintains that Capone’s quiet time in Lansing, and the respect and affection he got from local Italian- Americans, gave him the nudge he needed to turn himself in and go legit.

It will disappoint a lot of people that Marvin and her fellow Historical Society members have found no evidence Al Capone was ever in Lansing.

“We have yet to find the smoking gun,” Marvin said (with a straight face). “It’s long been part of local lore that he would eat at Emil’s when he was around, but no one’s ever found that picture of him sitting in the restaurant.”

Bergreen has one Round Lake “witness” who said, “You can’t believe the way that old man would swim.” Capone was 27 in the summer of 1926.

‘Witch hunt’ in Lansing

As a bookend to the lesser-known prehistory of Prohibition, the City Hall exhibit also shows that the temperance movement didn’t end with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. East Lansing was dry until 1970. Lansing didn’t allow the sale of liquor by the glass until 1952. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union evolved into a long-lived political party, the Prohibition Party.

An Ingham County ballot from a 1952 election, on display at the exhibit, lists the “Prohibition ticket,” along with Democrats, Republicans and the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Another theme of the City Hall exhibit explores Prohibition’s unintended consequences. Breaking open the males-only tavern culture and emboldening and encouraging women to drink and carouse with men, albeit in illicit speakeasies, is one of them.

Loopholes in Prohibition laws allowed the manufacture of "remedies" like BonKura, manufactured in Lansing, with 16 percent alcohol.
Courtesy Historical Society of Greater Lansing

Another was the spread of patent “medicines” like BonKura, manufactured in Lansing. At 16 percent alcohol, BonKura packed a punch similar to a strong wine. The medicine came in flat, easy to hide flasks and was available at pharmacies. A rare bottle is on display at the exhibit.

“There were a lot of ways to get around Prohibition,” Marvin said. “Drug stores became everyone’s favorite place to go.”

A less benign consequence of Prohibition is evident in the infamous case of Etta Mae Miller, chronicled in the City Hall exhibit. Miller, a Lansing woman, was busted for selling two pints of homemade moonshine to an undercover cop on Oct. 5, 1928. She was 48 at the time of the arrest. (The house where the alleged crime took place is still standing at 1007 Lathrop St.)

She had 10 kids, the youngest was 13, and her husband was already in jail, also for selling liquor.

Because it was her fourth offense, she was sentenced to life in prison. Time Magazine reported that in the same court on the same day, “a bellboy had pleaded guilty to manslaughter (and) had been fined $400 and freed.”

The case made national news and a became a frequently cited case study in the excess of Prohibition zeal. The City Hall exhibit includes a Chicago Tribune editorial under the headline “Lansing, Mich. and Salem, Mass.,” comparing Lansing to the city famous for witch hunts.

In Garrett’s analysis, punishments for distributing liquor grew harsher as Prohibition continued, because “the noble experiment” stretched law enforcement resources past their limits.

“It made people think things had gone a little too far,” Garrett said.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, reporters caught up with Miller, “now destitute” and still living at her little house on Lathrop Street.

“Prohibition sent me and my husband to prison and kept us penniless all the time,” Miller said. “I don’t know just what will happen to us now but I believe it will be better without prohibition.”

She wasn’t the only one.

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