By turns a whiskey broker, editor of an influential wine and liquor trade publication, and chief spokesman for an anti-prohibition association, Thomas Mador Gilmore, shown here, proposed common sense solutions for the alcoholic excesses attributed to the saloon — but to no avail. In the end the “Drys” got their way and ushered in the era of the bootlegger.
Gilmore’s ability as a writer and speaker are all the more impressive given his lack of formal education. Born in September 1858 in Columbus, Georgia, he left school for good at the age of 12 when his cotton broker father died and Tom was called upon to augment the family income. Details about the next few years are scant but as he matured he gravitated to Louisville, Kentucky, the center of the whiskey industry. There he apparently clerked in one of the many distilling related companies and learned the trade.
In Louisville, Tom met Julia Foster, the daughter of a prominent Southern secessionist, Dr. A. M. Foster and his wife, Elizabeth. They married in December 1880 when he was 22 years old and she was 24. They would go on to have a family of four children.
Gilmore’s marriage may have encourage him to strike out on his own and he set up a business as a “commission merchant” and broker in the liquor trade. By 1900 he had entered a partnership with local businessman Albert Mead. Their firm, Gilmore & Read, Whiskey Commission Merchants, came to be located at several addresses on Louisville’s Main Street “Whiskey Row,” including an upstairs office at 125 Main, shown above.
During this period Gilmore’s astuteness and leadership in the liquor industry increasingly began to be recognized. When Kentucky distillers met to discuss a limitation of production in order to halt falling prices for whiskey, they repaired to the Louisville offices of Gilmore & Read for their deliberations. Gilmore’s reputation for integrity was enhanced when he was hauled into court by the distilling Samuels family, wife and son of W.B. Samuels. After W.B.’s death they contracted to sell their aging bourbon, the distillery property, and the business itself, through Gilmore. Having sellers’ remorse almost immediately, the son went to court, arguing his mother was on morphine and did not know what she was doing when she signed the contract with the broker. After Mrs. Samuels testified under oath that she “knew and understood” what she was doing, the court ruled in favor of Gilmore.
That victory may have been a “last hurrah” for Gilmore’s direct activities in the liquor business. On subsequent census forms he listed his occupation as “writer.” As early as 1895 he had written the definitive chapter on whiskey for the book “Memorial History of Louisville, from its Settlement to 1896.” In concluding his article, Gilmore wrote: “…Fine Kentucky whiskey sins far less than it is sinned against. Used in moderation and a properly matured state, is, beyond question, one of the great blessings to mankind.”
From that chapter it seemingly was just a short step to becoming the Kentucky editor and writer for Bonfort’s Wine and Spirit Circular, a semi-monthly journal published in New York City. The publication offered him a platform for his ideas, including: “Local option and high license [fees] are both growing with alarming rapidity, and if voters are not educated on the question there is no telling where it will stop, or what millions it may cost our trade.” He offered himself as a spokesman for the liquor industry against the Anti-Saloon League.
As Gilmore increasingly was becoming a national figure, he was experiencing domestic tragedy. In 1905 his wife Julia was walking home from a shopping trip. While crossing some railroad tracks she was hit by a train. Gilmore was away when it occurred but hurried home only to find that she had died. With her husband and young children looking on, Julia was buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery. Four years later, Thomas married a second time. His bride was Mary McGowan of Louisville, daughter of John and Lucy McGown and a woman thirteen years his junior. They would have one child, a son.
Throughout these years, Gilmore was developing an idea to keep the “dry” forces at bay. Alcohol was still being trafficked through interstate shipments in states that had passed prohibitionary laws. More could be gained, Gilmore insisted, by closely regulating saloons and retail sales of liquor though local license laws than by banning alcohol completely. He founded an organization called the National Model License League to promote the idea. At its zenith it boasted 35,000 members, many of them in the liquor trade, and was able to help enact laws in several states. The League was headquartered in Louisville’s Columbia building, shown here.
His advocacy drew fire on Gilmore. In 1910, he took the League message to Texas to counter an attempt by the Anti-Saloon League to ban liquor under a local option election. His advocacy triggered a 1911 Texas State Senate inquiry into his activities. Sometimes his own words triggered a firestorm. For example, in 1917, during World War I, he wrote a letter to a “dry” Congressman that said, in part: “I believe that a good drink to each soldier before a charge will insure that steadiness of nerves that wins battles.” As a result he was roundly criticized in prohibitionary media as insulting the troops by suggesting that alcohol fueled courage in combat.
For the most part, however, Gilmore’s speeches and writings were aimed at curbing the worst excesses of the saloon culture through locally crafted and rigorously enforced regulations on drinking establishments. Complete banning of the making or sale of alcoholic beverages, he predicted, would run up against the thousands of years humankind had drunk wine or used strong drink. He was convinced, Gilmore said, “…That the adoption of what is called ‘prohibition’ invariably drives the lawful element out of the traffic and turns the business over…to an element in our population that does not respect either law or public sentiment.”
In the end of course, all Gilmore’s exertions counted for nothing as the Anti-Saloon League and its allies triumphed with the imposition of National Prohibition in 1920. His strenuous efforts, however, did not go unnoticed. He was named a “Kentucky colonel,” an honorific bestowed by the state’s governor. By this time Thomas also was enjoying a spacious three-story home with wife Mary and his family, located at 1441 Highland Avenue in Louisville. At the same time, however, his health was failing from chronic kidney disease.
Gilmore lived long enough to see National Prohibition imposed, but before the full truth of his prediction about the rise of bootlegging had been revealed. According to his death certificate, shown here, he died on June 5, 1921, after a two year battle with nephritis. Buried in Cincinnati two days later, Gilmore was 63 years old. Thus ended the life of a true crusader who tried but failed to stem the tide of prohibition. With Repeal thirteen years later, however, many of the reforms Gilmore advocated in his National Model License laws were incorporated in the 1934 enabling legislation that re-established the liquor trade in America. 
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