Whiskey Men In & Out of Court

                                       

Foreword:  In researching the lives and careers of pre-Prohibition distillers, liquor dealers and saloonkeepers, court records often are an excellent source of information.   They provide insights into the activities and sometimes the character of whiskey men.  Featured here are vignettes of three such proprietors who spent copious amounts of time and effort involved in the justice system, often for different reasons.  

Billy Sunday

To suggest that Kinsey “Stormy” Jordan of Ottumwa, Iowa, was a complicated character is an understatement.  The famous Prohibitionist preacher, Billy Sunday, hailed him “as the only liquor owner who told the truth about booze,”  after Stormy had called whiskey “The Road to Hell.”  On the other hand, Jordan was described by another anti-alcohol zealot as “a man, known the State and nation over for his shameless, law-defying wickedness….” 

In the late 1879’s Jordan opened a saloon in Ottumwa, one he called “The Corn Exchange.”  The local newspaper called it “the finest in the city.”  He prospered until 1881 when legislators added an amendment to the state constitution essentially voting the state “dry.”  With the law due to go into effect on July 4, 1881, Stormy was faced with the prospect of having to shut down The Corn Exchange.  Taking the advice of a sympathetic Chicago federal judge, however, the saloonkeeper decided to sue the state. 

Accordingly Jordan brought suit in U.S. District Court and continued to run his saloon. He was arrested, convicted in a local court, fined — which he refused to pay — and tossed into the Ottumwa jail, shown here behind the courthouse.  His attorneys took Stormy’s incarceration to Federal Judge Love.  Love was not a “Dry” sympathizer and, despite the pleas of state officers, ordered Stormy released and ruled that his saloon could continue to operate until the federal case was settled.  

Undetered, local officials jailed Stormy a second time and again the matter was referred to Judge Love.  This time he scolded, not Jordan, but the local prosecutor.  Any subsequent arrest of Stormy, the judge asserted, would taken as meddling in a case pending before his court and would result in the offending local official being fined or even jailed.  With this ruling, Stormy kept his drinking establishment wide open day and night.  His defiance made headlines across America.  As result, Jordan was able to conduct what was said to be the only operating saloon in Iowa.  Only many months later when the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him did Stormy shut down The Corn Exchange.  Then, in a startling about-face, Jordan became an advocate for National Prohibition.

Harry W. Metcalf,  a Florida liquor merchant, frequently had a case, but not of whiskey, for the courts of justice.  The Florida State Supreme Court building in Tallahassee, shown here, must have seemed like a second home to him.  Metcalf won, he lost, but the results never seemed to affect his growing prosperity. 

Orlando was the scene of Metcalf’s first court fight.  In 1907 an election was held to determine if the sale of intoxicating liquors, wines and beers should be prohibited in Orange County.  The Commissioners certified that in the the election 592 votes had been cast against liquor sales and only 589 for them.  His saloon in jeopardy, Metcalf took the Commissioners to court, charging that the election was rigged and the results should be voided.  In a 3-2 split decision, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with him and nulled the vote.  His saloon stayed open.

The year 1915  found Metcalf back in the Florida Supreme Court.   In 1913 he had taken a five year lease on space in the Terminal Hotel, located on Bay and Johnson.  There he ran a saloon and package liquor store.  The Florida Legislature, in another move toward Prohibition, passed what became known as the Davis Package Act.  It decreed that a business selling liquor by the bottle on the same premises could not sell liquor by the drink.   With other affected whiskey men, Metcalf fought the law right up to the State Supreme Court.  This time he lost; the law was declared valid.  

Although forced to shut down his liquor business in 1919, ending sales of his flagship whiskey,"Briar Cave," Metcalf, by now a rich man, began to invest in fruit orchards. Despite his prosperity, however, Harry could not stay away from the Florida Supreme Court. In 1935, he sued a fruit wholesaler for failing to abide by a contract to take produce from his citrus grove.  After losing in the local court, he once more repaired to Tallahassee where the Florida Supreme Court justices rewarded him by once more finding in his favor.  

Metcalf’s “last hurrah” in the courts was in 1939.  He was 77 years old. He sued to void a deal in which he had sold some road bonds then in default, to speculators in return for warehouse receipts representing 400 barrels of whiskey.  When the bonds suddenly became valuable and were sold at a huge profit,  Harry claimed he had been cheated.  This time the Florida’s highest court upheld a lower court ruling that dismissed his complaint.  That marked the last time Metcalf shows up in official records.

A lightning rod for trouble, Isaac Ettinger ran a liquor business and saloon in Cleveland for about twenty years.  In the process, through his own stubbornness or just bad luck, Isaac seems frequently to have ended up in court.  A photo, showing Ettinger in a tender scene with his granddaughter, Doris, seems to belie the fiery and litigious nature of this whiskey man.

Ettinger made headlines in the Cleveland Plain Dealer  in a early morning of February 1893 when he, his wife and two of her lady friends, were forcibly ejected from a horse-drawn street car operated by the Woodland Avenue & West Side Street Railroad, the line shown here.  After a verbal battle with Ettinger over buying tickets the conductor threw the four off the trolley and called the police. Isaac was arrested.  Taken to the police station at 3 a.m., he made bail and the group was not detained but forced to tramp home through the snow.  After a judge dismissed the charges against him,  Ettinger filed a damage suit against the streetcar company for $2,000 ($44,000 equivalent today.)  The case hopped in and out of Ohio courts for two years — results unknown.

The saloonkeeper frequently was suing and being sued.  In 1881 he hauled a woman named Rosa L. Block into court for default of a loan, asking for compensation in money and land.  Isaac himself had faced a  bankruptcy suit in 1878 but emerged relatively unscathed.   Then Clevelander Mathias Nickels claimed that as he was passing by Ettinger’s saloon a heavy sign had fallen, breaking an large arc light and a piece of glass had flown into his eye.  He sued Isaac for $10,000 (equiv. $220,000) in damages.  In 1899 Henry Russon, Ettinger’s business partner in a company called Buckeye Hair & Fiber, charged in Cleveland’s Common Pleas Court that Ettinger had converted to his personal use the company’s entire stock and accounts worth $2,400.  It is unclear how either lawsuit turned out.   

Note:  More complete biographies of each of these whiskey men have appeared earlier on this website:   Stormy Jordan, March 30, 2017;  Harry Metcalf, May 12, 2012; and Isaac Ettinger, August 9, 1018.

Stormy Jordan and “The Road to Hell” in Iowa

 

To suggest that Kinsey “Stormy” Jordan was a complicated character is an understatement.  The famous Prohibitionist preacher, Billy Sunday, hailed him “as the only liquor owner who told the truth about booze.”  On the other hand, Jordan was described by another anti-alcohol zealot as “a man, known the State and nation over for his shameless, law-defying wickedness….”  Stormy’s reputation spread far beyond Ottumwa, Iowa, and rendered him the subject of national attention and controversy.

Born in Jefferson County, east central Ohio, in 1832, he was christened Kinsey by his parents  but early picked up the nickname “Stormy,” possibly as a result of an 18th century hymn entitled “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks.”  Little is recorded about his life before Jordan arrived in Ottumwa in 1860.  After working for a time in a local packinghouse, he opened a small saloon in the basement of a building across from the train station and erected a sign on it that read:  “The Road to Hell.”  It was said to be dingy place, probably not unlike the interior of an Iowa saloon of the era shown below.

It was the illuminated “Road to Hell” sign that endeared Billy Sunday to Stormy.   Shown left, the fire-breathing Temperance preacher and former baseball star also was impressed that anyone who came into Jordan’s saloon and asked for the best he had in the house was surprised when the proprietor put a pitcher of ice water in from of him on the bar.  “And right under the main sign of Stormy’s bar was a smaller sign which read ‘Nose paint,’” enthused Sunday.

It was not clear if Sunday ever ventured into Jordan’s saloon.  Another sports hero of the time who definitely had no problem imbibing the strong stuff stopped by.  So the story goes, John L. Sullivan, the former heavyweight champion, walked into Stormy’s saloon and called for a cigar.  Jordan placed a box before him, and when Sullivan asked the price, the proprietor in his gravelly voice croaked, "A dollar apiece." Laying down a $20 gold piece John said, "I'll take the box," and walked out.

Seven years after arriving in town, Stormy married Mary Sophia Wood, the daughter of a prominent Ottumwa physician, Andrew D. Wood, and his wife Eliza Ann (Pease).  Mary Sophia bore him two daughters before dying in 1872 at 30 years old and five years of marriage.  Left with two toddlers,  Jordan wasted no time remarrying.  This time his bride was, Julia Frances Wood, the younger sister of his first wife.  He was 41, she was 20.  Julia would bear him five more children. 

Despite his notoriety as a saloonkeeper, the people of Ottumwa came to respect Stormy for his straight talk and plain dealing.  Three times they elected him to the city council.  They also patronized the “Road to Hell” saloon in such numbers that Stormy was forced to expand.  In the late 1879’s he opened a new watering hole, one he called “The Corn Exchange.”  The local paper called it “the finest in the city.”  This saloon was located adjacent to the city’s main business district, shown below.

As Jordan prospered, however, prohibitionary forces in Iowa were gathering strength.  A 1851 law had forbidden “dram shops,” where only alcohol and no food was served.  Saloons always had food and were not affected until 1881 when legislators added an amendment to the state constitution essentially voting the state “dry.”  With the law due to go into effect on July 4, 1881, Stormy was faced with the prospect of having to shut down The Corn Exchange.  Taking the advice of a “wet” Chicago federal judge, however, he decided to sue in U.S. District Court.

Accordingly Jordan brought suit and continued to run his saloon. He was arrested, convicted in a local court, fined — which he refused to pay — and tossed into the Ottumwa jail, shown above behind the courthouse.  His attorneys took the case into U.S. District Court before Judge James M. Love, shown left, a longtime serving federal jurist appointed by President Franklin Pierce.  A former army officer in the Mexican War and Iowa politician, Love was not a “dry” sympathizer and, despite the pleas of state officers, ordered Stormy released and ruled that his saloon could continue to operate until the federal case was settled. 

Unconvinced, local officials jailed Stormy a second time and again the matter was referred to Judge Love.  This time he scolded, not Jordan, but the local prosecutor.  Any subsequent arrest of Stormy, the judge asserted, would taken as meddling in a case pending before his court and would result in the offending local official being fined or perhaps jailed.  With this ruling — and his continued operation — Stormy’s defiance made headlines across America.  

Almost overnight Jordan became a national figure, attacked by some, lauded by others.  Appleton’s Magazine reported:  “Let us not do injustice to “Stormy” Jordan, in some ways the most picturesque figure that emerged from the dust of the fight and the most irreconcilable fighter of them all….Jordan kept his place wide open day and night, paying penalties, fighting, and gaining national fame as a consequence.”  In 1904 a play called “The Missourian”  toured widely throughout the United States.   A leading character was a saloon keeper called Stormy Jordan.  “Drys,” however, excoriated Jordan as a scofflaw and he became the subject of one prohibitionist’s verse:

True self-respect would just as soon

Meet Death as enter a saloon—

The Stormy Jordan “Road to Hell,”

Or the tobacco-monger’s cell.

Like Judge Love, Iowa Governor Horace Boies, shown right, was accused of being “soft” on Jordan.  In an open letter to Boies, a female constituent demanded that “…liquor dealers shall obey the law.  If ‘new and extraordinary’ measures be needed, then adopt them and stand by them in the name of law and order.  The man and officer who would do less is an anarchist and a traitor.”

Ignoring these imprecations, Jordan continue to run his saloon for years while his case toiled through the federal judicial system all the way the way to the United States Supreme Court.  As result, Jordan was able to conduct what was said to be the only operating saloon in Iowa.  After his federal suit was decided against him, however, he decided on a different course.  According to the Ottumwa Courier, he called the newspaper to say he would succumb to the inevitable and quit the saloon business, at least in Iowa.  

He then apparently decided on a more drastic pivot:  He became a Methodist and a full-fledged evangelist.  Reported the Wines and Spirits Journal:  “His appeals now to his old associates are eloquent and hundreds are flocking to hear him.”  The publication, however, scoffed at this conversion:  “The Methodists are welcome to ‘Stormy’ Jordan.  The liquor trade wants none of him or his class.”

Although the Iowa law eventually was repealed, Stormy Jordan did not return to the liquor trade.  In the 1900 census, he recorded his occupation — perhaps tongue-in-cheek — as “day laborer.”  He died five years later, age 73, survived by his widow, Julia, and seven children.  With family and friends in attendance by his graveside, he was interred in plot 330/K in the Ottumwa Cemetery.

In its obituary The Courier recognized Jordan as one “whose spectacular career as a saloonkeeper won him a national reputation.”  The newspaper followed with a statement that makes a fitting ending to the Stormy Jordan story:   “He was a man of strong character and marked eccentricity, strictly honest and honorable and generous to a fault.”