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.

Whiskey Men Rough on Authority

                  

Foreword:   Having provided two recent posts on whiskey men who were heavily engaged in building up their communities, I think it appropriate here to feature three who defied authority in states from North Carolina to Wisconsin to Iowa.   Although the three are linked by their clear distain for government controls and the officials designated to enforce them, each had his own way of dealing with them.

“Old Nick.”  It is a common term for the Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, or what ever you call the evil spirit.  Nicholas Glenn Williams, a North Carolina whiskey man, not only ran a distillery business called the “Old Nick Williams Company,” but demonstrated repeatedly during his life, that he truly had the “Old Nick” in him and indeed was capable of “raising Hell.”

Established in the distilling business at Panther Creek plantation, shown below, Williams was constantly harassed by temperance forces in North Carolina, for a time outsmarting them..  Early in the 1900s he got crosswise with the Federal Government by failing to pay his liquor taxes.  The story is that during a visit to nearby Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Williams was confronted by a  revenue officer who accused him of tax evasion.  A powerfully built man, Williams is said to have pulled the official out of the Federal Building and onto the street where he beat him with a buggy whip.  So potent was Nick’s political clout that he was never charged or arrested for the assault.

  

As everyone knows, however, the Feds are not easily discouraged.  Williams was hauled into Federal Court for failure to pay his rectifier tax. In addition to distilling spirits he also was rectifying (blending) them for sale.  Already paying a stiff federal tax on each gallon of whiskey he was distilling, the law directed him to pay the government to blend them, a levy he and other rectifiers bitterly resented.   Found guilty. Williams was ordered to pay a fine of $5,000, more than twenty times that amount in today’s dollar, and assessed court  costs.  

Ever the stubborn rebel,  Williams fought the decision, claiming that the original Federal Circuit Court had erred in setting the payment date and thus nulled the verdict.  He claimed to owe nothing. First heard in Federal Appeals Court, the case eventually made its way to the United States Supreme Court. That body in 1905, rendered a decision that, in effect, told Old Nick to pay up.  

Soon after, Williams was out of the whiskey trade.  In 1908 North Carolina by a substantial vote of the populace banned all alcohol production and sales.  The Williams distillery was forced to close.  Some of his work force moved on to Kentucky, reportedly taking the stills with them.  Panther Creek reverted purely to farming.  In the 1910 census, Williams would list his occupation as running a horse farm.  He was 45 years old.  

William Bergenthal was well known for his ferocious temper.  The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, distiller and liquor dealer, it is said, once physically threw a deputy sheriff out of his office who had come to collect a bill because the lawman made a remark impugning his honesty.  Bergenthal would have been well advised to do the same when corrupt Federal revenue officers came looking for bribes.  He did not and thus became implicated in the giant 1870s criminal conspiracy known as “The Whiskey Ring.”  

When Milwaukee distillers found that Chicago whiskey was selling in town for $1.15 a gallon, they quickly understood that the Illinois distillers were not paying the tax but paying off the tax collectors.  Some Milwaukee whiskey manufacturers, including William Bergenthal, were enticed by crooked revenue agents to join them.  

In 1875 the Department of the Treasury conducted a series of raids in Midwestern cities, arresting distillers and liquor wholesalers.  Bergenthal was among them.  Apparently taking the fall for William was his brother August who, with another company employee, spent four months in the Milwaukee County Jail for “misrepresenting the company’s alcohol tax records.” 

William Bergenthal himself was far from being off the hook.  In 1876 the U.S. District Attorney brought an indictment into Federal Circuit Court in which the Milwaukee distiller was cited as a material witness.  The government charged that he had met with a group of co-conspirators two month after the raids to plot with them the theft and destruction of incriminating documents that were believed held by Federal authorities in Chicago.  For this heist the alleged thieves demanded $50,000, the present day equivalent of $12.5 million.  

If the government had been able to prevail in this case, it was only a matter of time until Bergenthal and other colleagues would be in the dock.  The Court, however, ruled that the theft had never gotten beyond the discussion phase and that “some act must actually be done” to constitute a conspiracy.  While far from exonerated, Bergenthal continued to be a major figure in Milwaukee business circles until his death in 1909.

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.

Gaining the respect of Prohibitionist Billy Sunday, shown here, for calling his saloon “The Road to Hell,” Jordan prospered in his Ottumwa drinking establishment.  Despite the Iowa legislature voting the state “dry” in 1881, he filed a suit in Federal Court and continued to run his saloon.  Local authorities regularly jailed him only to have sympathetic judges let him go.  With his releases and the continued operation of his saloon — Stormy’s defiance made headlines across America.  

Almost overnight Jordan became a national figure, attacked by some, lauded by others.  Appleton’s Magazine opined:  “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.”  Jordan continued to run his establishment for years in Ottumwa, shown below, as the only operating saloon in Iowa, while his case toiled through the federal judicial system all the way the way to the United States Supreme Court.  

After the Supremes decided against him, however, Jordan decided on a drastically different course.  According to the Ottumwa Courier, he called the newspaper to say he would succumb to the inevitable and quit the saloon business.  Perhaps remembering his salute from Billy Sunday, Stormy Jordan became a traveling Methodist evangelist. Reported the Wines and Spirits Journal:  “His appeals now to his old associates are eloquent and hundreds are flocking to hear him.”  

Each of these whiskey men were notable for their defiance of law and government officials —  two of them employing bodily violence. Yet all three managed to avoid any prolonged incarceration for thumbing their noses at authority and, as they aged, each of them settled down to less contentious occupations.

Notes:  More complete vignettes on each of these whiskey men may be found elsewhere on this website:   Nick Williams, October 4, 2013, William Bergenthal, September 1, 2014, and “Stormy” Jordan, March 30, 2017.