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5: Epilogue
<< 4: Scenes along the Gulf Coast || Bibliography
Enforcement and diplomacy proved
frustrating endeavors relative to the Eighteenth Amendment. Predicaments facing the U.S. government in
connection with smuggling in southern waters, in many respects, eclipsed
similar circumstances elsewhere in the country.
Natives residing along coastal areas resisted prohibition legislation,
and organized crime capitalized on this proclivity by plying local markets and
employing local labor. The federal
government, meanwhile, held the difficult task of policing 10,000 miles of
coastline for a society that was in retreat on the alcohol issue. Foreign roles in the movement of alcoholic
spirits into the United States, additionally, proved more determined than the public
will to blunt the traffic.
The Gulf of Mexico accounted for only about
twenty-seven percent of the spirituous liquors seized nationally by customs
officials during 1931 and 1932. Federal
officials, however, really did not know the volume of alcoholic contraband
moving into the United States from the Gulf of Mexico, or anywhere else for
that matter. Attempting to track or
reveal smuggled cargo volume statistically is difficult since the very nature
of this activity, of course, runs counter to practices of good record
keeping. This is especially true when
one attempts to gauge some measure of the smuggling trade along the Gulf Coast,
which Admiral Billard conceded during congressional hearings. Thus, all seizure statistics reported by
federal officials in the Gulf of Mexico must be weighted to the level of manned
resources available, which, as shown earlier, lagged behind different regions
of the country.[1] Therefore, a statistical foundation on
smuggling levels anywhere in the United States might be beyond the grasp of the
historian.
Clearly, the federal government slowed
smuggling and bootlegging trafficking in the South, but to any significant
level it failed to arrest the alcohol distillations and the coastal smuggling
trade. Rumrunning boats from Latin
American ports--hulls laden with contraband--found safety from the Coast Guard
in the vast network of islands and coastal apertures throughout the Gulf
Coast. Mexican, Central American, and
Cuban locales--areas also highly Catholic and economically
depressed--additionally proved willing vendors in answering demand. Indeed, the Gulf South had its own large, yet
mostly undocumented, cast of rumrunners, bootleggers, mobsters, tipsters,
gamblers, all operating in areas hospitable to wet proclivities.[2]
It was evident that many of the larger--and
slower--rumrunning ships in fact left Atlantic coastal areas in the wake of a
beefed up federal presence. Moreover, as
faster boats became available, the larger rumrunning ships lost their value on
the Atlantic coastlines and moved south, away from the stronger Coast Guard
positions. Many of these larger Gulf rum
ships subsequently operated out of the smuggling-friendly ports of Belize and
Honduras as well as in Nassau and Havana.
In the meantime, federal personnel assigned to patrols in the Gulf of
Mexico tailed these larger rumrunning vessels mostly in cutters. The Coast Guard actually featured around
twenty destroyers in its 500-boat fleet, but curiously the agency sent
destroyers into the Gulf of Mexico on only one or two instances.[3] Rumrunners, meanwhile, pressed every
advantage, especially relative to the Anglo-American Treaty of 1924, which
precipitated confrontations with the Coast Guard. In some cases, Coast Guard policing decisions
unwittingly placed State Department officials in diplomatic quagmires.
By the mid-twenties, it was apparent that
the federal government could not contain liquor movement in those southern
communities that wished to remain wet.
Alluring profits coupled with prevalent Catholic backgrounds disregarded
reform- and Protestant-minded calls for alcohol temperance or prohibition. The federal government did score several
enforcement victories in New Orleans, which prompted police to issue statements
that New Orleans liquor trafficking had been checked, but this too only proved
illusory.[4]
As in other parts of the country, smuggling
levels along the Gulf Coast clearly demonstrated widespread public opposition
and suggested the federal government indeed had moved beyond reason in
attempting to define illegal behavior.
Historian Richard Hofstadter posed the quandary of prohibition:
For
Prohibition, in the twenties, was the skeleton
at the feast, a grim reminder of the moral frenzy
so many wished to forget, a ludicrous caricature
of the reforming impulse, of the Yankee-Protestant
notion that it is both possible and desirable to
moralize private life through public action.[5]
Prohibition
legislation resulted in the confusing federal goals, objectives and
jurisdictional ambiguities of those federal agencies charged with enforcing the
Volstead law.
Meanwhile,
the social, political and economic realities along many areas of the Gulf South
proved vexing to enforcement and profitable to the sympathetic natives. In the midst of government disorientation, a
vibrant, yet stealthy, cast of traffickers acted roles that attested to the
argument that prohibition was an ill-chosen path. Unfortunately the very dynamics of smuggling
portend that very few individual accounts remain extant. Extrapolating from the federal records,
however, it is evident that the many individuals who assumed bootlegging,
moonshining, and smuggling roles in the South indeed executed their roles so
well that they are perhaps forever beyond the grasp of full definition and
understanding.
[1]Annual Report of
the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances, fiscal year ended
June 30, 1932, 139; Congress, House, Subcommittee of the Committee of the Ways
and Means, Enforcement of Customs, Narcotic and Prohibition Laws, 69th
Cong., 2d. session, February 21, 1927, 444. Congressional Information Service
(CIS) Microfiche.
[2]New Orleans Times
Picayune, Sect. 2, April 22, 1923; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of
Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R., (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 288; H.W.
Rickey, "Prohibition Movement in the South," (Masters Thesis, Tulane
University, 1924), 291; C.H. Gervais, The Rumrunners, A Prohibition
Scrapbook, (Scarborough, Ontario: Firefly Books, 1980), 11.
[3]Malcom F. Willoughby,
Rum War at Sea, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964),
118.
[4]Times Picayune, June 14, 1925; New
York Times, October 15, 1925.
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