On a Sunday afternoon in June 1913, Solomon H. “Sol” Dreyfuss was found dead of gunshot wounds lying in his office at the Paducah, Kentucky, liquor house of Dreyfuss & Weil. His hand was near a pistol he kept in his desk. The family claimed an accident; onlookers suspected suicide. No formal investigation ensued. Dreyfuss’s death certificate simply gave the cause as “gunshot wounds…manner unknown.” Questions remained. Suicide takes one shot, Dreyfuss had been shot twice — each potentially causing instant death. One shot entered the liquor dealer’s right temple. The other bullet pierced his skull back of the right ear. Looking at available evidence years later, Paducah police concluded Dreyfus was victim of a homicide. But who shot him and why?
This whiskey man earlier had stirred considerable national controversy. A popular muckraking American journalist Will Irwin, writing in Collier’s Weekly of May 16, 1908, blamed some liquor dealers for suggesting that their gin possessed the properties of aphrodisiacs. “The gin was cheap, its labels bore lascivious suggestions and were decorated with highly indecent portraiture of white women.” Such liquor, he implied, could drive men to rape and murder. Irwin, shown here, singled out for special attention Dreyfuss & Weil’s “Devil’s Island Endurance Gin.”
Sol Dreyfuss had registered the trade name in 1905. One of his ads boasted that Devil’s Island Endurance Gin was made from a secret European formula and that by its third year in production 7,619,410 bottles had been sold in the U.S. The liquor came in half pint, pint and quart bottles, embossed with the name and bearing a label that depicted a man in a cage being poked by two devils. A rear label made it clear that Dreyfuss, Weil & Co. were sole proprietors.
The brand’s early 1900s trade cards seem to bear out Irwin’s contentions. One here shows a man peeking into a woman’s beach dressing room where it is not clear how clothed she is. Opened, she is seen wearing a bathing suit and seems little disturbed about being watched and says: “Those fellows who drink that Devil’s Island Endurance Gin seem to have the very “devil’ in them.” Note that from the shadows, Satan is watching.
In her book, “Jews and Booze,” Marni Davis comments that Irwin’s Collier articles implie that Jewish distillers, saloonkeepers and liquor wholesalers [like Dreyfuss] were operating unfettered “at just the moment when the South desperately needed this flow of liquor to be staunched….National magazine readers absorbed this image of the immoral and self-interested Jewish alcohol entrepreneur.…” Davis noted. Might one of them in a misguided effort to protect Southern womanhood have shot Solomon as he worked in his office?
The notorious anti-Semite automaker Henry Ford in his racist publication “The Dearborn Independent,” also attacked Jewish “whiskey men.” In one issue Ford specifically targeted Dreyfus and Weil as major culprits in what he saw was an international Jewish conspiracy. Many American Jews were frightened by Ford’s rants and given what later happened in Germany, they likely should have been. Having specifically fingered Dreyfuss, could Ford have inflamed a maniacal follower to murder him?
Dreyfuss’ personal history gives few, if any, clues as to what may have happened. Born in Germany in 1856, Sol followed an older brother, Barney, to the United States. Barney early on was established in a Paducah liquor business with a partner named Weil. With Sol’s arrival in the U.S. about 1870, the brother worked him into the business before moving on to Pittsburgh to manage the Pirates baseball club. (Barney Dreyfuss is credited with initiating the World Series in 1903.) Sol proved to be as effective a businessman as his brother, keeping the liquor house prosperous for the next 25 years, the latter years as sole proprietor after Weil’s death.
In addition to his best-selling gin, Dreyfuss sold more than a dozen brands of whiskey. They included: "A. M. Jones,” “Cold Spot,” "D & W Pride,” “Dreyfus,” "Eaton Valley,” “Eclipse,” “Fairfield,” "Merchants Club,” "Old Cold Spring,” "Old Dixie", "Old Picket,” "Peter Cooper,” "Red Devil,” "S. H. Rollins,” and "The Big Three.” Of his labels Dreyfuss trademarked only five: Endurance Gin and Eclipse Whiskey in 1905 and Old Cold Spring, Peter Cooper and Red Devil whiskies in 1906. He provided customers with shot glasses advertising several of these brands.
Sol’s personal life seemed without incident. About 1880 he married Tillie Hene, the daughter of a prominent Paducah dry good merchant, Isadore Hene. The 1910 census found the couple after 30 years of marriage living with their son, Samuel, 25, and a daughter, Aimee, 18. Also in the household was a sister-in law, Belle Weil, and her daughter, Lucille. Sam was working in his father’s liquor house, including serving as traveling salesman for its products.
Two disturbing business-related incidents, however, stand out. In September 1910 theLouisville Courier Journal reported that Alexander Djlaske, a longtime East Coast representative of Dreyfuss, Weil & Company, had been arrested in Boston for forging seven company checks worth $5,500 (value today $155,000). Djlaske denied that he had anything to do with the alleged forgeries, and claimed the charges resulted from jealousies of others in the company's over his success as a salesman. How this incident played out is unknown. Could Djlaske have held a grudge against Sol for issuing the arrest complaint? More alarming, Dreyfuss' store had been broken into several times in the months preceding his death, usually on weekends. Substantial amounts of liquor had been stolen. Had Sol surprised burglars who wrested a gun from him and then shot him with it? Suspicion also might have fallen on the son who found him.
No such speculation seems immediately to have followed Sol’s death. Fingerprints were not lifted from the gun, the liquor dealer’s office was not searched for clues, no interrogations were conducted and no official police report was filed. The family’s insistence that Sol’s death was an accident was accepted by authorities and the case closed. That two shots had been fired seemed to concern no one.
Solomon Dreyfuss was given a quick funeral and buried in Temple Israel Cemetery in nearby Lone Oak, Kentucky. Dreyfuss. Weil & Company continued to function under the management of Sam Dreyfuss until 1919 when the advent of National Prohibition shut its doors. “Devils Island Endurance Gin” went out of existence never to be revived. With 1934 Repeal came laws that banned suggestive liquor advertising. What remains today is only the unanswered question: Who shot Sol Dreyfuss?
Note: This post was drawn from a number of diverse sources, several noted in the text. Crucial to it were the companion stories in the The Paducah Evening Sun of June 9, 1913. The information about Paducah police now believing Dreyfuss’ shooting was a homicide came from an undated article by Jeff Youngblood entitled: “The Early Life and Times of Barney Dreyfuss.”
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