Whiskey Men and Machine Politics

          

Foreword:   It should be no surprise that a number of whiskey men were involved in political life at the local and state level, nor that a few of them might have been embroiled in machine politics.   Such men often had money, local influence and interests to be protected politically. It could be just a short step from there to being a machine “boss” or operative.  Four such situations are chronicled here in American cities as diverse as Louisville, Denver, Memphis and Kansas City.

Louisville earned the title “Whiskey City” as the center of the Kentucky distilling industry, a place where many leading liquor producers and wholesalers operated.  The Whallen Brothers, John Henry, shown left, and James Patrick, dominated politics in Louisville for many years as well as being whiskey men in their own right.

It was not their liquor trade, however, that thrust the Whallens into the political arena.  It was the need to protect their entertainment business.  They also were running the Buckingham Theater, shown below, with presentations featuring scantily-clad women who provided “female companionship” and off-stage services to male patrons. John immediately recognized that his theatrical enterprises would be under constant pressure from the more respectable elements in Louisville.  Already with wealth and influence, the Whallens decided to flex some political muscle.

By the mid-1880s the upstairs “Green Room” in the Buckingham Theater had become the hub of local Democratic politics  and John was dubbed the “Buckingham Boss.”  Others called him “Boss John” and some “Napoleon.”  In 1885 he engineered the election of Louisville’s mayor and for his efforts was rewarded with being named Chief of Police.  No more surprise raids on Whallen theaters.  One biography asserted that Whallen “... influenced every Louisville and statewide Kentucky election for the rest of his life. In addition to bribing officials and controlling assistance programs, at his peak Whallen controlled the awarding of 1,200 city patronage jobs.”

The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Arthur Krock recalled Whallen’s dominance of Louisville politics in his memoirs, describing the Buckingham Green Room as “the political sewer through which the political filth of Louisville runs.”  Not all in Louisville shared that attitude.  John was noted for his charitable work, providing food to the out-of-work and assisting the poor.  As a result he was popular among immigrants, blue collar workers, and Catholics. They saw him as their champion against the Louisville establishment.

When John died in 1913, the levers to the Whallen machine were handed to James, shown right.   The brother, although he had been important in the rise of the family fortunes was unable to maintain the power of the political organization John had built.  James lacked the charisma of his old brother and gradually the power of the Whallen political machine faded. 

By contrast, Wolfe Londoner’s attempt at a political machine were very brief.  A well-known liquor dealer and grocer, working from his four story building on Denver’s Arapahoe Street,  Londoner had built a reputation as civic activist and decided to take that prestige into the political arena by running for mayor.  His “machine” was composed of the city’s local saloon and gambling bosses, who wielded considerable political power in Denver.  Londoner was seen as someone who would be sympathetic to their interests against a growing tide of prohibitionism and puritanism in Colorado.

His rowdy crowd of supporters provided Londoner with volunteers that included notorious Western gunslingers Bat Masterson, shown left, and Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith.  Led by those “bad boys,”  Londoner’s friends stuffed ballot boxes and traded drinks for votes at local saloons on election day.  Londoner became Denver’s 20th mayor by a whopping 77 votes. 

If Londoner had thoughts about creating any kind of permanent machine, however, they were soon dashed.  Even before he could take office, opponents were filing charges against him.  It took a while before the legal challenges could make their way through the courts and while they were, Londoner served more than a year as mayor, until forced by court orders to resign.  He was Denver’s first Jewish mayor and the only mayor ever removed from office.  Wolfe went back to his liquor trade.

Louis Sambucetti, shown falls into the category of machine operative.  The child of immigrants, he grew up working in his mother’s saloon, perhaps fantasizing about becoming a wealthy and important figure in Memphis, Tennessee.  He would find that path to fortune and recognition in the liquor trade and by cultivating influential friends.  Among them was John T. Walsh, a grocer who had become a powerful political figure in Memphis, one known for being able to deliver the Irish vote.  Seeing Sambucetti as a leader of a growing Italian population,  Walsh brought him into his fold.

In 1906, when a Walsh crony was elected Mayor and Walsh himself was Vice Mayor and Fire and Police Commissioner,  Sambucetti was selected to serve as one of several Memphis Supervisors of Public Works.  Serving in the same capacity was E. H. Crump, whose rise from that post would be meteoric.  In the second term for the Walsh ticket in 1908, Sambucetti had the same position, but Crump, shown right, now had been raised to Fire and Police Commissioner. 

In 1911, Crump, right, obtained a self-serving state law abolishing the existing city government and  establishing a small commission to manage Memphis, an arrangement he dominated as “Boss” Crump for the next fifty years.  Sambucetti never held public office again.  Initially his “godfather” John Walsh sided against Crump dooming any chances Louis might have had to stay in office.  Seeing the newcomer’s hold on the city, John T. eventually capitulated and threw in with him, supporting Crump’s organization thereafter.  Louis made a quick exit from politics and stuck to running his liquor business thereafter.

That brings us to one of the most notorious political bosses of American history — Thomas J. Pendergast.  Some say that Tom Pendergast was just a Kansas City, Missouri, saloonkeeper and liquor dealer who came to the rescue of a failed clothing store proprietor.  Others say he was a high powered political boss who helped make Harry Truman the 33rd President of the United States.  Both are right.

For many years in the early 1900s Pendergast controlled Kansas City, historians say, much like a CEO controls a large corporation.  Presenting himself as a businessman, he ran the city, providing jobs for the working population, choosing municipal and state leadership, and directing a political “machine” that helped fill his pockets with kickbacks and bribes.  Although he had many business interests,  Pendergast was first and almost always (with a partial “time  out” for Prohibition) a dispenser of liquor.  

In 1924, as Pendergast’s political power was growing, he bought the Monroe Hotel at 1904 Main Street and several years later built a two-story yellow brick building next door that he called “The Jefferson Club.”  From that location, shown below, Tom held court, dispensed patronage and controlled city, county and even Missouri state politics.  He also was building a business empire of construction and other companies to undertake public works and services that were fertile sources of graft money.  Pendergast became known as “King Tom.”

Enter Harry Truman.  Truman had served with distinction in World War I but found civilian life more challenging. Co-owner of a men’s clothing store in downtown Kansas City he saw the business go bankrupt within two years,  a victim of the 1921 Depression.  A comrade in arms of Pendergast’s nephew, the honest and hardworking Truman soon came to the attention of Pendergast himself,  who backed Truman’s election for presiding judge of the county court.  Truman won and kept the job for eight years.  Pendergast became his political mentor and helped elect him a U.S. Senator from Missouri.  

But as Truman’s star was rising, Pendergast was on the skids. A strong reform movement in Kansas City eventually kicked out machine politics.  King Tom’s gambling habits incurred heavy debts, ones he attempted to pay off with money from crooked deals.  Arrested and convicted in 1939, Pendergast spent 15 months in prison.  While he was incarcerated and even afterward, his son, Tom Jr., took over the management of the family liquor interests.  Tom Pendergast died four years later.   Despite many who urged him to do so, Harry Truman never renounced his friendship with the political boss who gave him his start.

Note:  For more more complete vignettes on each of the whiskey men featured here, see Whallens, January 29, 2014; Londoner, November 26, 2017; Sambucetti, March 10, 2017, and Pendergast, December 2, 2013.

Whiskey Men and the Gunslingers

Foreword:  Whiskey and the American West have been inextricably intertwined in both history and myth.   Saloon scenes seem to be a requirement for any motion picture depicting the “Old West” and are a favorite location for shootouts.  As exaggerated as such depictions may be, gunslingers did exist and whiskey men had to deal with them.  As the four saloonkeepers featured here demonstrate, they chose a variety of strategies.

Austin’s Iron Front Saloon, shown right, has been recognized widely as one of the notable “watering holes” of the Old West.  Like other Texas saloons, it saw its share of violent encounters but was known for its gracious and well-liked owner, John B. Neff, a proprietor who was overshadowed in his own establishment, however, by the man who ran the gambling concession upstairs, the notoriously dangerous Ben Thompson.  

Thompson, shown left, was a gunfighter with a number of killings attributed to him, quick to anger and reach for his gun, especially when he had been drinking.  That Neff selected Thompson to operate the gaming room with its faro, monte, poker, dice and roulette tables, might have puzzled his customers, but the owner had good reason.  Thompson had reputation for running honest games, an oddity in Austin, and his prowess with a pistol kept things orderly .  As much as $30,000 month might pass over the tables — equivalent to a quarter million dollars today.  Shown here is the actual roulette wheel used by the gunslinger.

Unfortunately, Thompson could not avoid violence.  In 1881 he had gotten involved in a dispute with a saloon and hotel owner in San Antonio, shot and killed him.  Although it cost him his job as town marshal, he was tried and ultimately acquitted of murder and returned to Austin to continue to run the gambling at Neff’s Iron Front Saloon.  In 1884 he ventured back to San Antonio, was lured into an ambush, and met with a hail of bullets.  Shot in the head, Thompson died instantly.  

The life of Ben Thompson has earned him considerable attention in subsequent years, including a long Wikipedia entry and many Internet photos.  Meanwhile, John Neff, the genial saloonkeeper, ironically has gone largely forgotten.  The bad men of the West unfortunately get far more publicity than the good guys.

Known as among the wildest of Western towns, Dodge City, Kansas, shown here, had a reputation for frequent murders and casual justice.  A Kansas newspaper in the 1870s declared:  “…We have only room for one Dodge City; Dodge, a synonym for all that is wild, reckless and violent; Hell on the Plains.”  This milieu failed  to deter Henry Sturm, a German immigrant saloonkeeper and liquor dealer, who faced off in Dodge against formidable odds — a gun-toting gang led by Bat Masterson, shown below.

Sturm had arrived in Dodge City about 1876 to establish a wholesale and retail liquor store.  He prospered and a year after arriving bought the Occident Saloon.  It is shown above as reconstructed as part of an “Old Dodge” exhibit.  Sturm soon was heavily engaged with other business owners in efforts to tame Dodge City’s image as a lawless frontier town, involving him deeply in what became known as “The Saloon War of 1883.”

The conflict began when authorities banished from town Luke Short, the owner of the Long Branch Saloon.  Quick with a gun himself, Short was backed by gunslingers like Bat Masterson, described at the time as “one of the most dangerous men in the West.”  Repairing to Topeka, Kansas, Short and Masterson assembled a group of armed men with the purpose of returning to Dodge and reeking revenge. When the pair threaten to bring their rowdies to town, the local sheriff enlisted local guns.

Sturm put himself on the line, signing an anti-gang telegram to a reluctant  Kansas governor, asking that state troops be deployed.  The message talked of the need in Dodge for “clearing out” the guntoting crowd.  It continued “This element has to be banished or else respectable people have to be bulldozed and browbeat by a class of men without any vested interest or visible means of support….”  High tension gripped Dodge City for days.  In the end issues were negotiated and no shots fired.  Masterson returned to town a year later where he opened a short-lived newspaper, seemingly devoted to justifying his position during the Saloon War.

Jack Ryan took an entirely different approach to the outlaw element.  Not being able to beat them, he has been accused of having joined them.  After robbing a coal company payroll of $8,000 the notorious Butch Cassidy and the outlaw gang he headed known as the “Wild Bunch,” stopped in Ryan’s Home Ranch Saloon in Baggs, Wyoming, got drunk and shot up his bar.  As the story goes, Ryan stayed calm through the chaos and was rewarded with a silver dollar for every bullet hole found in his walls and ceiling.

Moreover, Ryan was able to earn the confidence of Cassidy and the others as a reliable collaborator.  When he moved to Rawlings, Wyoming, the Wild Bunch followed.  Shown here is a photo from about 1889, showing the gang and Ryan posed in front of the saloon,  That is Cassidy in the bowler hat, standing fourth from the left.  Jack Ryan is standing on the steps above him, also wearing a bowler.  Mischief would follow.

Subsequently two of the last great American train robberies occurred in Wyoming, one at Wilcox where the Wild Bunch got away with $30,000 (equivalent to $750,000 today) and a second near Tipton, Wyoming, when $50,000 in gold was taken.  Suspicion immediately fell on Ryan who was a former brakeman on the Union Pacific and presumably had inside knowledge of railroad operations.  Giving him the code name “Basket,” investigators opened a criminal history dossier on him.

Nothing was ever proved, however, and Ryan continue to prosper as a saloon owner while detectives hunted down most of the train robbers.  The Wild Bunch became history, its members, including Butch Cassidy, shot dead or in prison.  Meanwhile, Ryan was expanding his business interests with large real estate holdings, oil rich lands, a productive stone quarry, and a horse ranch.  He became active in civic affairs and a co-founder of the local lodge of the Fraternal Order of Elks.  Any taint from Ryan’s association with outlaws seem to have been forgotten.  Of him a local newspaper editorialized:   “A man with diversified interests is J. P. Ryan and since his advent in Rawlins no effort has been spared by him for the advancement of the town’s best interests.”

For decades the men of the family of Ernest Schwethelm (pronounced “Sweet-helm”) were virtually synonymous with the famous Texas Rangers, lawmen whose mission was to bring law and order to the Lone Star State.  His father, Henry, was the captain of a ranger company tasked with patrolling the Texas hill country against cattle thieves.   Schwethelm, shown here at a ranger reunion, served with the organization before moving to Kerrville, a market town and county seat, where, with a partner, owned and operated saloons.  Among his drinking establishments were the Ranch Saloon, left, and the Favorite Saloon. Both were housed in sturdy Italianate style buildings and still stand in Kerrville.

Despite Schwethelm’s background as a lawman, the Ranch Saloon had a reputation for being a rowdy place and reputedly the site of the murder of a Texas Ranger.  His name was Tom Carson, a man with a reputation for being tough, bad tempered and somewhat mysterious.  Although details about the event and his assailant are sketchy, Carson reputedly was shot and killed in the Ranch Saloon in April 1893.

No such violence attached to Schwethelm’s Favorite Saloon.  While catering to the ranch hands who supplied the wool and fleece markets that operated in Kerrville, Ernest was rectifying liquor, blending whiskeys to achieve taste and color and selling the results via the post office and railroad express to the increasing number of “dry” counties around Texas.  He had progressed beyond pushing drinks over the bar into a commercial operation that sought a wider customer base.  In a word, the Wild West saloon was beginning to go Main Street.

A photograph exists that epitomizes the changes at work in Texas. It is 1912.  Henry Schwethelm and his three sons, Texas Rangers all, who had known the perils of being lawmen when the state teemed with outlaw elements, are with wife and mother, Emilie, for a 50th wedding anniversary.  Ernest Schwethelm is standing center. The men are all dressed in suits and ties, flowers in their button holes, looking like Rotary Club businessmen.  

Each of the four saloonkeepers featured here took a different strategy to dealing with armed and dangerous hombres --   from collaboration and tolerance to opposition and active law enforcement.  No matter their approach, a strong and inevitable march toward civilization was taming the West and ending the day of the gunslingers.

Note:  For more elaborated stories on the four whiskey men here, please access the following posts:  John Neff, September 18, 2014;  Henry Sturm, June 15, 2017;  Jack Ryan, November 18, 2015;  Ernest Schwethelm, November 15, 2013.

Henry Sturm Faced Down Trouble in Dodge

 Known as among the wildest of Wild West communities, Dodge City, Kansas, had a reputation for frequent murders and casual justice.  Neither seemed to deter Henry Sturm, a immigrant saloon keeper and liquor dealer, who faced off in Dodge against two formidable opponents —  a gun-toting gang led by Bat Masterson and later fanatic prohibitionists in the sway of hatchet-swinging Carrie Nation.

Sturm was born in Germany in 1837 and received his early education in local German schools.  At the age of 14 he left home and set out for the United States.  Fourteen was the youngest an unaccompanied youth could book such a passage, indicating Henry’s strong desire to settle in the New World.  The next twenty years of his life are unrecorded but my speculation is that he was working in the mercantile trades, including sales of alcohol.  According to a biographer, in the mid-1870s Sturm settled in Junction City, Kansas Territory, in government employment, possibly as a storekeeper.

He first came to Dodge City about 1876 when he was 39 years old, a distance of about 210 miles, to establish a wholesale and retail liquor store.   In some ways Dodge offered better opportunities than Junction City.  Buffalo hunters and traders made it a frequent destination.  More important, the town was a stop on the Santa Fe trail.  According to one observer, "If you stood on the hill above Dodge City, there was traffic as far as you could see, 24-hours a day, seven days a week on the Santa Fe Trail.”  When the railroad arrived in 1872, Dodge’s commercial base became firm, as indicated by a photo of downtown by 1880.

On the negative side, in 1876 here were nineteen places licensed to sell liquor in Dodge City, then a town of only twelve hundred residents.   Shown here is the interior of a typical Dodge City saloon.  During summer months when transients poured through town business was brisk.  For the rest of the year saloons and restaurants depended on the inhabitants — one watering hole for 60 people.  The residents did their part — one year the local press reported 300 whiskey barrels had been emptied.

Such reports did little to raise the reputation of the town.  A Kansas newspaper in the 1870s reported: “Kansas has but one Dodge City, with a broad expanse of territory sufficiently vast for an empire; we have only room for one Dodge City; Dodge, a synonym for all that is wild, reckless, and violent; Hell on the Plains."

Despite these challenges, Sturm prospered.  A year after his arrival he bought the Occidental Saloon from Moses Waters and James Hanrahan. It is shown here as reconstructed as part of the “Old Dodge” exhibit.  Sturm advertised…”a pint, a keg, or barrel of the very best, old Irish, hot Scotch, six year old hand made sour mash Kentucky copper distilled bourbon or old Holland gin.”  

Sturm also became the agent for Schlitz beer out of Milwaukee.   With the coming of the railroad, it became possible to receive fresh shipments of brew regularly. According to accounts, Sturm once unloaded an entire boxcar of Schlitz into his ice house and sold it to a horde of cowboys, resulting in a epidemic of drunkenness in Dodge.

Now firmly established in business, in 1878 Sturm took a bride.  She was Regina Berg, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, where Henry may have worked for a time, and of German immigrant parents.  The difference in their ages was notable. He was 42, she was 18.  They would have a family of three girls.  In the meantime, Henry was gaining a local reputation for fair dealing and probity that saw him elected twice as Dodge City’s treasurer and at least once as councilman. “Mr. Sturm is a fair, square and honorable man,” opined the Dodge City Times in 1883.

His civic work brought him increasingly into efforts to tame Dodge City’s image as a lawless Wild West frontier town.  The violence was brought home to him in early September, 1879, when, following an altercation, a tailor shop owner sitting on a bench next door to Sturm’s saloon was brained with a rifle by a drunken antagonist.  

Sturm’s sternest test came during what was known as “The Saloon War of 1883.”  The conflict began when authorities arrested three women singers at Luke Short’s Long Branch Saloon. When things escalated, Short was banished from Dodge.  Quick with a gun himself, Short was backed by gunslingers like Bat Masterson, shown here, described at the time as “one of the most dangerous men in the West.”  Repairing to Topeka, Kansas, Short and Masterson assembled a gang of rowdies with the purpose of returning to Dodge and getting revenge.

Sturm put himself on the line, signing an anti-gang telegram on May 13, 1883, to a reluctant Kansas governor, George Washington Glick, asking for state troops.  He also signed an anti-gang article sent to the Topeka Daily Capital newspaper.  When Masterson and Short threatened to bring their gang to Dodge by train, the local sheriff enlisted local guns.  High tension gripped the town for days.  In the end, the issues were negotiated and no shots fired.  Masterson returned to Dodge a year later where he opened a short-lived newspaper, principally it seems to justify his position.

Meanwhile another even more serious challenge had arisen for Sturm.  Kansas always had harbored a prohibition-leaning population, individuals who saw in liquor the cause of the unrest and violence that marked the state’s history.  In 1881, those forces pushed through a relatively weak “temperance” law.  It did virtually nothing to curb the sale of alcohol through stores or saloons.  Proprietors like Sturm annually paid a small fine and kept the doors open.  The meantime the German immigrant was pursuing other avenues.  He built a bottling plant where he manufactured a range of soft drinks, including soda, mineral waters and cider.  He owned two ice houses, respectively 20 by 230 feet and 30 by 50 feet and regularly stored 400 tons of ice to supply the city

In 1885, however, a new law, one with real force, was enacted by the State Legislature.  Sturm and his colleagues had no choice but to shut down their watering holes.  He advertised the sale of eighty barrels of four-year-old whiskey and other liquor.  He even sold the bar fixtures.  The law, however, still allowed the sale of alcohol for “medicinal, mechanical, and scientific purposes.”  Henry Sturm became a “druggist” with permission to sell alcohol for those purposes, locating the new enterprise just down the street from his old saloon. His druggist’s permit, recently donated to a Dodge City museum, was dated Nov. 30, 1885.

One author has described this blatant effort to circumvent the prohibition laws:“…Druggists equipped their shops with a rude plank or bar, set up whiskey barrels to accommodate the legions of suffering who daily arrived for medical aid….The most preposterous device of the time, not uncommon, was the ‘refillable prescription for chronic alcoholism.’”  While Sturm also served his brands of soft drinks in his drug store, liquor was its mainstay — as it was for hundreds of similar enterprises throughout Kansas.

Carry Nation, the crusading prohibitionist, had recently moved back into Kansas and led the campaign to close those establishments, wielding a hatchet as she went from town to town, shouting at proprietors, “Stand aside, you felonious purveyor of bottled drugs from Hell!”   Although no evidence exists that she ever visited Dodge City, her rampages made news throughout America. Sturm could never be sure she would not show up at his front door someday, swinging her hatchet.

This possibility may have been part of his motivation for helping to build a church in Dodge City.   With beer shipments no longer arriving regularly, one of his ice houses became superfluous.  He had it torn down and donated the stone to build St. Cornelius Episcopal Church, completed in 1898.  Shown here, the small edifice has been described as a “little gem — the most artistic building in Dodge City.”  Still standing, the church architecture has been compared the chapels of rural England.

In middle age Sturm developed health problems.  In March 1886 Denver newspapers noted his arrival, “a prominent merchant from Dodge City” for unspecified medical treatment.  In 1897 at the age of 60, he died and was buried in Dodge City’s Maple Grove Cemetery, Section 3. Regina would join him there 50 years later.   Shown here is their joint tombstone.

In a town filled with colorful and flamboyant characters,  Henry Sturm stands out as the kind of solid citizen that help build respectability for Western towns.  The statement he signed onto about the Luke Short and Bat Masterson gang set the tone:  “The occasion or what the press have called trouble is…a clearing out of an element composed of bold daring men of illegal profession who, from toleration from the respectable portion of the community, are allowed to gain a prestige found difficult to unseat.  This element has to be banished….”