closingbell DETROIT'S RUMRUNNERS
Wet Behind the Gears
LIQUOR SMUGGLING WAS DETROIT'S SECOND-LARGEST INDUSTRY DURING PROHIBITION, AS ILLEGAL SHIPMENTS FROM CANADA COMPETED WITH BACKROOM STILLS
Even before the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution brought about national Prohibition, Michigan had already gone dry: In 1916, voters passed a statewide alcohol ban, 353,373 to 284,754. What this meant is that Detroiters had a leg up on bootlegging after the U.S. Volstead Act provided for enforcement of Prohibition, which took effect Jan. 16, 1920. And despite the precedent they had already witnessed, local authorities were completely flummoxed by the mass defiance that followed.
Dizzying quantities of whiskey and beer came across the Detroit River from Ontario in everything from railroad boxcars to ferry passengers' hip flasks. The Detroit News estimated that more than 400,000 cases of Canadian whiskey and other alcoholic beverages arrived in Detroit during May of 1927. The following year, the total was 3.1 million gallons from Canada. The value of the hooch exceeded $20 million (tax free), and smuggling ranked as the city's secondlargest industry.
"Long before Prohibition, Detroit had become one of the country's leading manufacturers of marine engines and power boats and could easily meet the demand of smugglers," writes historian Philip P. Mason in Rumrunning and the Roaring Twenties: Prohibition on the Michigan-Ontario Waterway. Meanwhile, the 28-mile Detroit River was rife with marshes, islands, and docks.
Police initially found themselves powerless to prevent the smuggling. In 1920, Detroit Police Commissioner James Inches' fleet consisted of a single "seaworthy scow that, [with] an effort, could overhaul a tug boat." The Michigan State Police joined the next year with "a single ancient craft." (It was armed with machine guns, though.) The state police later acquired several boats equipped with 200-horsepower engines. The Detroit police soon followed with sleek runabouts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard commissioned impressive cutters from Bay City's Defoe shipyard. Along with border-patrol vessels, it all added up to the Prohibition Navy.
Organized crime entered the picture around 1923, and the Purple Gang supplied Al Capone with Old Log Cabin whiskey by truck and railroad. At least three Mafia families were represented on the waterways. Small-time smugglers in motorboats and jalopies had to contend not only with police, but with another ubiquitous menace: hijackers.
Although crime was rampant, the greatest public outrage arose after lawenforcement efforts went awry. In a five-page letter to a Chicago businessman, former Packard Motor Co. president Henry B. Joy explained why he'd become a national spokesman for the repeal of the 18th Amendment. He related how he began to find his household servants engaged in surreptitious brewing. And it was a "hard thump" that no one "was practicing what we had voted for."
Meanwhile, to elude the Prohibition Navy, local syndicates began deploying fleets of airplanes. Further complicating things, the Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929, followed by the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel in 1930. Joy and other likeminded leaders eventually prevailed, but it took the deaths of dozens of police and smugglers, with recreational boaters occasionally caught in the middle.
On Dec. 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment, Prohibition was repealed and Detroit was once again wet.
OTHER CLOSING BELLS
DETROIT'S FIRST AIRPORT: The Sky Was the Limit
DETROIT'S RUMRUNNERS: Wet Behind the Gears
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