When Woodrow Wilson left the White House in 1921, he moved to a 12,000-square-foot home in Kalorama, an elevated section of Washington that provided him and his wife with an unobstructed view of the city all the way to the Potomac River.
Moving his household necessitated a special dispensation from Congress because Wilson had a large collection of fine wines and, under the terms of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, the transportation of alcoholic beverages – even within a city, even over a distance of barely a mile – was forbidden.
This anecdote is one of many contained in a new book by Garrett Peck, a writer based in Arlington, Virginia, who has a keen interest in local Washington history and the history of alcoholic beverage regulation. (His previous book was called The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet.)
So it was no surprise that the book party celebrating the publication of Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t was held at the Woodrow Wilson House, now a museum (in fact, the only presidential museum in the District of Columbia).
Starting with the ‘Temperance Tour’
Peck explained in an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner that the Wilson house is the final stop on the “Temperance Tour” of Washington that he has led since 2006. This walking tour gave him the idea for his most recent book and also provided him with much of the material for it.
Using primary source material, including newspaper databases, microfilm, diaries, memoirs, and magazine articles, Peck prepared a chapter “on spec,” which he presented to his eventual publisher, The History Press.
That chapter was called “The Man in the Green Hat,” and it was about George Cassiday, who was the personal bootlegger to Members of Congress during Prohibition.
One he sold the idea for the book, he dived deep into his source material.
“I used a lot of primary material,” he said, such as “the Washington Post online archives. I went to the D.C. public library and dug through microforms of different newspapers.”
He discovered that there are “actually a lot of biographies from the 1920s, so I used a lot of those. Probably 90 percent of the book is primary research,” he explained, which included interviews with descendants of some of the key players of the era.
Surprising and unexpected
Three things struck Peck as surprising as he conducted his research.
One was the “size of the brewing industry before Prohibition,” in Washington, he said, “which was huge, and then seeing it just collapse with Prohibition. That was really surprising.”
He also wrote a chapter on African-Americans in Washington, D.C., during Prohibition.
Nobody, he pointed out, had previously written about that community, "because the press was segregated at the time.”
That lack of coverage had the result, Peck said, that working on the chapter on Washington’s African-American neighborhoods “was probably about half of my research time, just trying to come up with an answer to, ‘What did black people think about Prohibition?’”
The difficulty of researching that topic “really surprised me,” he said.
His third surprise came in the form of the “back-to-back stories of Rufus Lusk and George Cassiday,” which came out in the press “within about a month of each other” in the fall of 1930. Lusk, who founded a real estate records firm that still bears his name, had published a map of Washington showing all the speakeasies in the city, meant to demonstrate how ineffective Prohibition enforcement was.
Cassidy “spilled the beans about bootlegging in Congress” in a series of articles for the Washington Post. That, together with Lusk’s map, Peck explained, “just had a huge impact for the wet cause and helped shift the country towards repeal” of Prohibition, which finally came in December 1933.
In part two of this interview, Peck explains why the number of drinking establishments in Washington exploded during Prohibition.
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