The Pious, the Underpaid (and Desperate), and the (truly) Hypocritical
Now, who are the Bad Guys, again?
The "Why" of the Late Prohibition Era in Puget Sound, WA
Oh, bad guys. Villains. They make a story so interesting, especially when those doing the dirty deeds are supposed to be the good guys. My story, Welcome to Cottage Bay, begins along the shores of a mythical salt waterside town set in the South Puget Sound of Washington State during Prohibition. And what story during that time wouldn’t be complete without the pious, the underpaid, and the hypocritical souls of that era.
It’s set in a time not too long after what became known as Black Tuesday, the Stock Market crash of 1929. By then, Prohibition stunted so many industries related to spirits, wine, and beer – agriculture, wood barrel-making, and transportation, just to name a few – it fed a financial fire storm culminating in this great social and economic disaster.
After October of 1929, the Great Depression really got her “Mad On.”
Welcome to Cottage Bay
Our historical fiction and romance is set at the apex, or rock bottom, of Prohibition, depending on your point of view. Our heroine, Rose Nicovich, is part of a Croatian family of fishermen living in a mythical waterside town of South Puget Sound, Cottage Bay. She’s a teacher and the evening and weekend librarian; desperate to keep the family afloat when her father dies suddenly a month after Black Tuesday in 1929. She is also charged with assuming the reins of the new family business, distilling bootleg whiskey. By this time, Rum Runner Roy was incarcerated on McNeil Island following a kangaroo court of a trial. His conviction was fraught with tampered and manufactured evidence, coached witnesses, threatened jurors – you name it. Bootleg industry chaos followed the wake of his boat trip to prison.
The local, state, and federal Prohibition authorities were frequently infighting and when they weren’t doing that, they were charging at full speed up and down the Puget Sound waterways chasing a new band of rum runners in very fast boats. The illegal whiskey industry (and law enforcement) was at a crossroads – whether booze from Canada or what we call “rot gut” moonshine. It was coming in big shipments or just a trickle, depending on whether law enforcement was cooperating with one another or with the bootleggers.
Enter Rose Nicovich and her delightful batch of spirits, including bourbon, rye whiskey, and even a special vanilla whiskey, suitable for special holiday celebrations. No Prohibition Agent would take notice of a humble immigrant family of fishermen puttering out of Cottage Bay to Seattle, selling their locally-caught fish directly to restaurants and markets – or at least that was the plan. Meanwhile, a false compartment below the hatch and the fish held a much more profitable catch – whiskey.
Part 1: The Pious
AKA, the self-righteous, sanctimonious “Dry” advocates for Prohibition.
It’s important to understand that women built the Prohibition movement as a platform to secure the right to vote. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League, were arguably the most powerful PACs of the day. They pushed, prodded, and lobbied Congress, shaming elected officials and bureaucrats, alike. It’s no coincidence that after ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1920, enacting a nationwide prohibition on the manufacture and sale of alcohol, that the 19th amendment was ratified in 1921 (finally) securing a woman’s right to vote in America.
If you gasp in wonder at how it took a constitutional amendment for women to vote, please don’t. Since its inception, our Supreme Court has been a political tool as often as it’s been an independent, judicial body. In 1875, by a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court ruled, Minor v. Happersett, that a woman’s right to vote was left up to the individual states and was not guaranteed in the constitution or in the 14th Amendment. It took another 46 years and another constitutional amendment to gain that right.
In order to define their platform, members of the “Dry” movement vilified those who drank and decried the evils of alcohol. These pious Christians – men and women, alike – painted alcohol as a family abuser. The “Drys” pointed to families without food, saying the cause was from husbands who drank all their wages. In communities across America, they campaigned on the premise that alcohol caused moral decay at such epic proportions that without such laws, our society would crumble. They just glossed over the notion that alcohol abuse might have been a symptom of the problem in the yawning and ever-widening economic gap between the “haves” and “have nots” – leading up to Black Tuesday, 1929.
With their moral dander aflutter, and wielding Christian Family Values as a political baseball bat, theirs was a fevered pitch demanding the government enact Prohibition laws.
Part 2: Enter, the Underpaid … and the Desperate and Despicable
As if to magnify all of this political tumult, Washington State granted women an early right to vote in 1873, though our state Supreme Court repealed it (to my earlier point). In 1910, Washington ultimately granted women the right to vote in state elections and ballot measures. As a result, our women’s movement helped pass a ballot measure in 1915 enacting the prohibition of alcohol several years earlier than the rest of the country.
OMG. What were we thinking?
Given our location in the apartment downstairs from Canada, where they struggled with prohibition laws and ultimately restored its legality (we LOVE you Canada) you could clock with an egg timer how long it took to set up whiskey smuggling operations over water, railway, car, and airplane. We had a solid jumpstart on how-to reasonably run an illegal alcohol industry.
A real-life historical figure of this era was the whiskey king pin, Roy Olmstead. He was known affectionately as Rum Runner Roy, and called The Gentleman Bootlegger. He was a former Seattle Cop and also a class act. He didn’t even allow his men to carry guns. Roy’s brand of How to Win Friends and Influence People taught us to join forces with law enforcement. So he recruited just about everyone along his route from the San Juan Islands to Seattle, from a lowly sheriff’s deputy to the Coast Guard. Everyone got a little extra cash at the time it was desperately needed. Financially, everyone struggled.
To make matters worse, when America passed the federal law prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and purchase of alcohol, the US Treasury was left holding the short straw. Underfunded and understaffed, they had the responsibility of policing a law that no one but a self-righteous few believed in. And Treasury paid their Prohibition Agents “pour” wages to enforce this wildly unpopular law. An agent’s pay during that time ranged from around $1200 to $2400 a year, barely enough to remain in the middle class. It was no small wonder they were so easily corruptible.
Part Three – The hypocritical
By 1930, Prohibition was a wildly unpopular law. The Drys and the Wets were at odds, with the members of the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon league holding a death grip on the Republican Party – they were desperately trying to maintain their political hold with command of Prohibition. They wanted all bootleggers, rum runners, and moonshiners rounded up and publicly hung, drawn, and quartered, by any and all means necessary. In the pursuit of protection for the American Family and these Christian Family Values, the ends surely did justify any and all means.
In this story, you will meet a couple real-life historical figures who broke the law, created chaos in the streets, planted evidence, modified wire-tap transcripts, intimidated and coached witnesses, and actually sold recovered whiskey from the back of their company cars.
Yep, they were Prohibition agents.
I know, right? Yeah, whenever you get people in power, you also risk having those people abuse it. Especially when you underpay them and give them moral license to skirt the law because the ends justify the means. It’s a lethal cocktail.
One of these real-life characters was Agent Richard Fryant, who originally hailed from New York, where he worked as a telephone wireman. In Seattle, he put his skillset to work skirting what wiretap laws we had back then, and being coached by Assistant Prohibition Directory, William Whitney, to perjure himself in the pursuit of convicting Roy Olmstead. You will also meet a particular brute, Agent James “Two Guns” Johnson. His nickname came from a penchant for wearing a gun belt with two holsters. He was famous for shooting into the air when he had an audience. Oh, and he was a back-shooter, too. A real moral giant, he was.
Washington’s US Attorney, Tom Revelle, felt those type of tactics were totally justified. “Some of them deserve a good killing,” he said, in confidence to Senator Wesley L. Jones, Washington State’s ranking Republican Senator. “I am not losing any sleep if now and then a bootlegger is killed.”
“Kinky” Thompson was another Prohibition Agent who was so brutal that he beat an entire family to death – including their nine-year-old child. In a community once known for maintaining civility while rum running, it got particularly brutal with the removal of Roy Olmstead and the introduction of these kinds of enforcers and their tactics. You will not meet “Kinky” in this story – he was shot and killed in 19XX. Shocker.
Turnabout is Fair Play
This idiom is kissin’ cousins with others, such as Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword, or What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander, or, my personal favorite, What Goes Around, Comes Around. These types of sayings are rooted in experience.
Skirting the law in pursuit of enforcing it, brutal investigation and arrest tactics, withholding, modifying, or manufacturing evidence to get to a conviction – yeah, soon enough, the enforcers of Prohibition got served up a dish of their own making.
Welcome to Cottage Bay is a great big old story – It’s a love story, it’s several loves, actually. It’s also a story set during The Great Depression and includes a bit about Croatian commercial fishing during that time in history. This story weaves together real-life places and people with tales of this era in Puget Sound. It’s important that I get it “right” or at least that I present my understanding in a way that allows you to consider more and draw your own conclusions. I feel honored that the Dream Angels entrusted me with these characters and their story. In the telling of it, I hope I do right by all of them – the fictitious ones as well as the real life figures who shaped our history.
