Foreword: I am constantly amazed at the contributions made by so many pre-Prohibition distillers, liquor dealers, and drinking establishment proprietors to their communities. Pilloried by the “drys” as forces of evil, many devoted time, energy and resources to improving the quality of life their cities and towns. Sometimes their good works were recognized by their fellow citizens and they were raised to political office. Briefly told here are the stories of three whiskey men who served as mayors led smaller cities.
Alexandria was a Virginia town with strong Confederate sympathies that greatly resented federal occupation during the Civil War. That animosity failed to deter a New Jersey lad of twenty-three who arrived in 1862 to sell whiskey to thirsty Union troops. Despite this problematic start, he became Alexandria’s mayor and a leading citizen while founding a liquor business that prospered until the advent of Prohibition. His name was Emanuel Ethelbert (“E.E.”) Downham, seen here in maturity.
Downham’s liquor business was on the lower end of Alexandria’s King Street. Whether he truly was a distiller, making whiskey directly from grain on his premises, is open to question. More likely he was a “rectifier,” someone who bought raw whiskey or grain alcohol from others, refined it, mixed it to taste, added color and flavor, bottled and labeled it.
In 1867, in the wake of the Civil War, the Alexandria City Council, seeking to raise additional revenues, put a series of taxes on alcoholic beverages imported into the City from outside the state, thus discriminating in favor of Virginia-made products. When the young upstart Downham refused to pay the tax, the Alexandria City Council sued him and won.
That incident seemed to stimulate Downham’s interest in politics. In 1874 Downham sought and won election from Alexandria’s Third Ward to the same City Council he had sued seven years earlier. He served there for two terms before seeking office on the Board of Aldermen and was elected there for five two-year terms. Following the sudden death of Alexandria’s mayor at Christmas 1887, the Board met to select an interim mayor from among their number. On the sixth ballot, Downham was chosen. He was reelected in his own right in 1890, serving a total of four years, during which he championed a number ambitious projects. Downham died in 1921 at the age of 82.
The “rags to riches” story is common in American folklore. But a man with the improbable name of Guido Marx followed a “refugee to riches” road as a whiskey and wine merchant that led him eventually to becoming the mayor of Toledo, Ohio.
Marx was a revolutionary fighting for German political rights against Prussian authoritarianism. The Revolution of 1848 was crushed. As participants were being arrested and executed, he fled to the United States, part of a German refugee group known in history as the “Forty-Eighters.” Settling in Toledo, Marx tried several occupations until 1860 when he bought a partnership in a whiskey “rectifying” and wholesale liquor business -- the oldest and largest in Toledo. It had been founded in 1850 by another German immigrant, Rudolph Brand. After Brand’s death five years later, Marx took over the firm.
Becoming wealthy and well-known, the former revolutionary began his American political career in 1869 when he was elected to the Toledo City Council. He subsequently was elected to the Ohio Legislature in 1871 and reelected in 1873.
In 1875, Marx was elected Mayor of Toledo, serving as the city’s first chief executive of Jewish heritage. It was a time of great mercantile and industrial expansion in that Lake Erie port. Guido was in the forefront of efforts to bring business and jobs to Toledo, retiring from politics in 1877 to become U.S. Ambassador to Chile.
Following that assignment Marx returned to Toledo. He continued to be appointed to local posts: Ironically for a former revolutionary, he served for six years on Toledo’s Police Board. In 1884 he became a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Toledo. Afflicted by a kidney disease, he died in 1899 at the age of 72 and is buried in Toledo’s Woodland Cemetery.
It may be a stretch to call Dr. Frank Powell, aka “White Beaver,” a whiskey man—but only slightly. A medical school graduate, comrade of Buffalo Bill, Western hero of dime novels, and inventor of patent medicines, Powell sold potions containing more alcohol than most whiskeys.
In the 1860s Dr. Powell was named as a surgeon in the Department of the Platte and later made medical director for the Winnebago Indians. According to legend, Frank got his name, “White Beaver” from riding into the camp of a hostile group of Indians, in order to inoculate the residents against small pox. Others say he got it by rescuing a Sioux princess. Regardless, he embraced the title, let his hair grow long, and began to polish his legend.
With his Indian nickname, his time in the West, and his association with Buffalo Bill Cody, Powell was a natural for dime novel fiction, a boom business in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The stories were about his “daring do” against a string of fictional adversaries.
In reality, much of the time Powell was working as a small town doctor in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. He also was putting his energies into mixing up and marketing a series of highly alcoholic patent medicines. This was an era when Indian remedies were very popular with the American public and Dr. Powell was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Best known of these concoctions was “White Beaver Cough Cream,” described as: “A soothing compound of lung healing root and herb juices, an unrivaled remedy for the cure of coughs, colds, croup, pleurisy, bronchitis, and all other diseases of lungs or bronchial tubes.”
His nostrums made him rich and launched Powell into politics. He won two elections for mayor of LaCrosse, a placid Wisconsin town located along the Mississippi River, serving at a time when the city, largest on Wisconsin’s western border, was gaining recognition as a medical and educational center. His local success spurred him to run to become the Badger State governor in 1888. His campaigning involved handing out a card with his portrait, one without the long hair and leather garments. Nevertheless “White Beaver” remained part of his signature. Powell died in 1906 at the age of 61 on a business trip to the Far West.
Note: Longer biographies of each of these “whiskey men” mayors are posted on this site: E.E. Downham, May 26, 2011; Guido Marx, May 21, 1911; and Dr. Frank Powell, February 25, 2019.
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