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.

The Vicksburg Ad Competition — Brennan vs. Crayton

In any Advertising Hall of Fame, Charles Austin Bates, left, deserves a statue.  Beginning in the late 1880s, writing in the publication “Printer’s Ink,” Bates judged American advertising for the effectiveness of the sales pitches and was instrumental in its modernizing.  In 1898, Bates happened on competing ads from two Vicksburg, Mississippi, whiskey dealers, John Brennan and Wesley Crayton.   As a result, he pitted them against each other for quality and delivered his verdict.

Bates had clipped two long advertisements from a Vicksburg newspaper that he believed indicated the whiskey business in town was good.  Which ad was more likely to draw customers?  What Bates almost certainly did not know was that the social divide between Brennan and Crayton was immense.  In “Jim Crow” Mississippi, Brennan was white;  Crayton was black.

John Brennan was born in Scotland of Irish parents and was brought to the U.S. as an infant.  Apparently unmarried, the 1900 census found him at the age of 49 living on Walnut Street in Vicksburg’s Fourth Ward at the home of his brother-in- law, Felix Hoerner.  Hoerner apparently was working with Brennan in the liquor business located at 330 South Washington Street, a major Vicksburg commercial avenue, shown below. 

In his advertising Brennan claimed that his was “The Oldest Liquor House in Mississippi,” established in 1868, only three years after the end of the Civil War.  Since he would still have been a teen, it is likely that he inherited or purchased an existing whiskey business.  Brennan also claimed to be the “The Cheapest Liquor House in America on Delivered Case Goods.”  Note the claim — not just cheapest in Mississippi, but America.

Brennan was not a distiller but a whiskey wholesaler and rectifier, someone blending whiskeys made elsewhere and decanted into his own containers for sale.  He was notable for having used stoneware covered in brown “Bristol glaze” with his name scratched in the surface.  Because of the method used, each jug was individualized, as shown here. 

 

They ranged in size from quarts to two gallon containers.  With time and technological improvements Brennan switched to a salt-glazed stoneware with a cobalt blue top and his name and address stenciled across the body, as well as using glass bottles.

Just off Washington Street at 507 Veto Street, Wesley Crayton was running a saloon and liquor store.  Although he was listed in city directories just below Brennan, there was a “c” behind his name that designated him as “colored.”Crayton had been born in 1859 in Mississippi of native-born Mississippians and had married in 1882 at the age of 23.  His wife, Henrietta, was from Virginia.  The 1910 Federal census found him living with her, a boarder, and a 75-year-old man listed as a servant.

As a successful businessman, Crayton had stature in the black community. In 1908 he was named a delegate to the Republican national convention, shown below, to select a successor to President Theodore Roosevelt.  Since the event was held in Chicago he would have ridden a train there, some of the time in the South in a segregated “Jim Crow” car.

Despite discrimination, Crayton sold liquor to blacks and whites alike.  Like John Brennan, he advertised extensively in Vicksburg newspapers like the Herald, challenging the Irishman by claiming that his was “The Oldest Whiskey House in the City.”  He would sell whiskey by the barrel or half barrel, he advertised, and “Wesley Crayton will fill your jug for you.”

This brings us back to Charles Austin Bates seizing on ads by each whiskey man and providing his analysis and judgment.  Both Vickburg dealers opened their ads with essays.  Brennan headlined his, “Whiskey Man Talks!”  There followed a screed on drunkenness:  “A man who is drinking for the mere brutal indulgence to satisfy an abnormal appetite, loses his good temper, watch, money and any other valuables he may have concealed on his person….”  Brennan dismissed that lout as a desirable customer in favor of “a sober, sensible man” who will appreciate that the Irishman sold “nothing but the best” brands of liquor.

Crayton began his ad by commenting on “The Peace Commission” that was arranging a final settlement with the Spanish government after its loss to the United States in the brief Spanish-American War.  He linked the Commission effort to the performance of duty and saw the current times (ignoring “Jim Crow”) as “a flourishing age of advancement” in which he himself had demonstrated “especial justice” in his conduct of the jug trade in Vicksburg.

Brennan followed his essay with a list of the liquor brands he featured with prices and ended with a special endorsement of his “Eight Year Old Brennan’s Choice” whiskey, likely a blend mixed up at his Washington Street establishment.“One drink to a well person,” he claimed, “is a guarantee of six months longer life of usefulness to the community in which he resides.”  In concluding his ad, Crayton headlined “Honesty is the Best Policy” with the assertion, countering Brennan, that:  “Wesley Crayton has the oldest Whiskey House and Jug Trade in the City of Vicksburg” and that he marketed to one of the largest territories for liquor sales in Mississippi.

Bates then provided his 1898 analysis of both ads, in keeping with his well known basic creed of advertising: “Show price.  Use simple English.  Never overestimate the consumer’s IQ.”  Finally and most important:  “Be truthful.”  He found Brennan’s lengthy discussion of drunkeness “questionable” but liked his pricing of brands, despite wondering how the dealer reconciled carrying nothing but the best whiskey with selling some for $1.50 a gallon.  Bates did not comment on the Irishman’s claim that drinking his “Brennan’s Choice” added six months of useful life.

Crayton’s ad puzzled Bates:  “All his talk about the Peace Commission doesn’t seem to have much of anything to do with jug promotion in Vicksburg.”  Bates also noted of Crayton that:  “He starts out in the first person singular, switches over to third person singular, and then in the last three lines he takes a hack at the subject in the first person plural.  Possibly that’s the effect of writing about whiskey.  The longer a man dallies with whiskey, the bigger and more numerous he thinks he is.”

In rendering his final judgment to his national audience, Bates gave the nod to the Irishman:  “Mr. John Brennan is distinctly modern in his methods.”  As for his rival:  “Mr. Crayton has made a desperate effort to break away from the old-style ad but he hasn’t succeeded.”

Although the assessment of Charles Austin Bates may have given Brennan some temporary bragging rights, both men would soon be facing reduced markets as Mississippi localities increasingly went “dry” under local option laws. When a statewide ban on making or selling on liquor was enacted in 1908, both Brennan and Crayton were forced to shut their establishments.  Brennan seems to have retired, spending his latter days rooming at Vickburg’s Royal Hotel.  Crayton in 1910 was recorded as running a billiard parlor and later working for a lumber company.  

Note:  Although it is clear that Wesley Crayton catered to the “jug trade,” I have been unable so far to find containers with his name on them to complement those of Brennan.  Crayton was one of several African-American liquor dealers in pre-Prohibition Vicksburg.  Vignettes of two others, Jerry Blowe (April 6, 2013) and N.C. Cannon (March 26, 2018) also can be found on this website.

The “Bitters Truth” of Wellington Hartman

          

Operating a liquor house in the small Pennsylvania town of Schuykill Haven, Wellington Hartman concocted and marketed his “Old Virginia Bitters,” asserting, among other claims, that it was “an infallible cure for all stomach troubles” and “a man restorer.”   Nonetheless, his wife was judged to have died of a stomach ailment and Wellington himself — well, that story is best left for later.

Hartman was a native Pennsylvanian, born in 1854 of parents also native to the state.  His early life has gone unrecorded.   Wellington surfaced in the 1880 federal census living on St. Peter Street in Schuylkill Haven, a town of about 5,000 located six miles south of Pottsville and 90 miles north of Philadelphia.  He was married to Esther Skean (also “Skeen”), born in Pennsylvania, the daughter of Edward and Hannah Adams Skean.  The Hartmans had one daughter, Catherine.  Wellington was working as a laborer.

Fast forward a decade.  Obviously demonstrating a talent for business, Hartman in 1900 had graduated from physical labor to become proprietor of a drug store he called Gem Pharmacy.  At the same time he was operating a saloon located on Schuylkill Haven’s Main Street, shown above, adjacent to the Pennsylvania Railroad depot.  Now the family was living on Main Street, likely above one of the businesses.

In 1904, Hartman sold his pharmacy to an employee and went full bore into alcoholic spirits.  An item in the local newspaper, “The Call,” told the story:  “Mr. Hartman has for some time been manufacturing specialties for the drug and liquor trades and has recently established a wholesale liquor house and he retires from the retail drug business in order to devote his time to the manufacture and sale of his specialties….”

A photograph exists of Hartman’s “Family Liquor Store” that shows two men standing in the doorway.  Given that Wellington would be middle-aged by 1904 my guess is that the gent at right is Hartman.   Note too that the sign over the door vigorously promotes the former druggist’s “Old Virginia Bitters,” advertised as “Tonic, Appetizer, & Man Restorer.”  The proprietor also was creating his own brands of whiskey and gin.  

Not a true distiller, Hartman was getting his alcoholic supplies from the many distilleries that dotted the Pennsylvania landscape.  He was buying spirits by the barrel, blending it, and then selling it under his own proprietary labels.  Shown here is a flask that held “Bo-Bo Whiskey, a blend that Hartman claimed, likely truthfully,  was “compounded with straight rye whiskey and other grain distillates.”  Less truthful was the claim that “Bo-Bo” was guaranteed under the National Food and Drugs Act of 1906.  That act guaranteed nothing and, in fact, many officials considered a blend such as this one to be “artificial whiskey.”   

“Bob White Whiskey,” shown in a dark amber quart bottle, also was branded as a compound.   Hartman made the same claim about the contents being guaranteed by food and drug legislation.   Such statements enraged Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, first head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he levied fines against those who used them, gradually ending such claims.  

As many liquor dealers did, Hartman issued giveaway items for favored customers.  Among them were a finely etched shot glass for his Bob White Whisky, a pocket mirror advertising both flask and quart sized bottles of his “Pure Corn Gin,”  and a cork screw bearing the name and address of his liquor house.

Hartman’s flagship, however, was neither of his whiskey brands but his “Old Virginia Bitters.”  Highly alcoholic, bitters were considered “medicine” and as such taxed by federal authorities at a lower rate.  Moreover, bitters were more acceptable to prohibition-leaning religious organizations. In 1880 both Wellington and his wife Esther, however, were “dismissed” from the Lutheran Church in Schuylkill Haven, possibly because Hartman was selling liquor.  Later both were accepted into communion at St. John’s United Church of Christ.  

Hartman advertised Old Virginia Bitters as:  “An infallible cure for all stomach troubles. One wine glassful taken immediately before or an hour after meals will be a swift and certain cure for dyspepsia, indigestion, liver complaint, catarrh of the stomach, etc.”   As comforting as those words might have been, the nostrum seems not to have been a “swift and certain cure” for the stomach ailments of Esther Hartman.   When she died in 1907 at the age of 50, her death certificate put the cause as “acute indigestion.”

Hartman’s Old Virginia Bitters was touted as a “man restorer.”  His pitch was: “Drink it plain or in whiskey three or four times a day, and you will feel like a new man. It is a fine bracer in the morning, builds up a broken down system in short order, is in fact a perfect restorer.”  He also sold “Hartman’s Celery & Damiana Compound” another nostrum that, he said: “…Braces the nerve and gives you courage.”  Damiana was an herb widely sold for prevention and treatment of sexual problems.  It also was believed to be an aphrodisiac.  The compound, like Hartman’s bitters, also provided a considerable alcoholic load.  Both were advertised in a trade card that when opened revealed a risque’ scene.

Events suggested that Wellington may have been juicing himself liberally with both nostrums.   Just six months after Esther’s death, he married again.  His bride was Elizabeth M. Thompson, an 18-year-old local girl.  Hartman was 53, a 37 year difference in age.  Regardless of that disparity Hartman appears to have been up to the husbandly task.  Ten month after the marriage Elizabeth gave birth to a son.  They named him Wellington Junior.  

This period also saw Hartman elected as the Chief Burgess of Schuylkill Haven. The chief burgess was the presiding officer of town council meetings, had a full voice and vote in all deliberations, and was also the chief executive charged with the preservation of order and administration of the borough government.  Hartman appears to have been a strict “law and order” official, quick to arrest all offenders.

He himself, however, ran afoul of the law.  A local merchant named Schumacher had a rain pipe on his store that extended over a sidewalk.  Every time it rained the pipe, one that featured a large hole, drenched passersby.  In line with his duties as burgess, Hartman went to the store and supervised removal of the pipe.  Schumacher was irate, stormed to the burgess office, and strongly berated Hartman.  The latter, possibly fueled by one of his male restorers, slugged Schumacher in the mouth.  Unamused, the merchant hauled Hartman into court where a friendly judge called the charges trivial and dismissed the case.

Throughout his career in government Hartman, according to local business directories, also maintained his liquor house, shown here as it looked circa 1910.  Although Pennsylvania was generally considered a “wet” state, it adopted a statewide ban making or selling liquor eleven months before the advent of National Prohibition.   Likely understanding the situation, Hartman shut down his liquor house about 1918 and turned to manufacturing soft drinks.

Hartman was in Philadelphia when he died in November 1924, just short of his 70th birthday.  His body was brought back to Schuylkill Haven and buried beside his first wife in Union Cemetery.   A final revelation into the sex life of a man who made a fortune selling alcoholic “man restorers” is offered by Hartman’s death certificate. After an inquest into the whiskey man’s demise the Philadelphia coroner gave his verdict on its cause: “chronic syphilis.”  This conclusion suggests that upon occasion Wellington Hartman might have become over-stimulated on his own nostrums and wandered off course.

Note:  In November 2013 Ferdinand Meyer V, immediate past president of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors, featured on his “Peachtree Glass” website an article on Hartman’s Old Virginia Bitters. Ferd took much of his information and illustrations from the Schuylkill Haven History Web Page maintained by Richard J. Nagle.  While trying to give Hartman’s story a somewhat more personal treatment, I have borrowed from — and thank — both.

Antonio Patorno — Caught in a Web of New Orleans Violence

The whiskey jug displayed here tells the story of a man whose life became entwined with the murder of the New Orleans police chief;  the arrest of colleagues, including his brother,  and the largest lynching of white men in the history of America.  He was Antonio Patorno, politician, militia captain, saloonkeeper and liquor dealer. 

Beginning about 1884 and continuing through to 1924, an estimated 290,000 Italian immigrants -- many from Sicily -- arrived in New Orleans fleeing economic and political unrest.  So many settled in the then run-down French Quarter that it gained the name, “Little Palermo,” the Italian town where Antonio (sometimes “Antonino”) Patorno had been born in 1849.

Only eight years old at the time and apparently accompanied by other family members,  Antonio emigrated from Sicily to the United States in 1857, according to a passport application.  He would spent his entire life as a resident of New Orleans.  The passport description describes him as a five feet, four inches tall, with blue eyes, brown hair, and prominent facial features.

Patorno's early employment has gone unrecorded but he likely was working in the grocery and liquor trade.  He is first recorded in New Orleans business directories in 1876 running a saloon and liquor store on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter.  Later, with significant success in his trade, he would move his premises to 543-545 Dumaine, the location shown here as it looks today.  Antonio had married at the age of 25 in 1874, the same year as his naturalization as a U.S. citizen.  His bride, a woman still in her teen years, was Virginia Sparicio, born in Louisiana of Italian immigrant parents.  The couple would have six children, four of whom lived to maturity.

Soon recognized as a successful businessman, Patorno also was exercising a leadership role in the Italian-American community.  Considered a “rising star” in the New Orleans Democratic Party, he was elected as an alderman in the early 1880s from the predominantly Italian Fifth Ward.  Records of his tenure include his activities on behalf of two youngsters, Grazia and Dominica Pecuraro, whose father had died in the Charity Hospital and whose mother was unable to provide them support.  Alderman Patorno vouched for their needs and helped find them homes.

One observer has noted:  “By the late 1880s, he [Patorno] had built a strong circle of supporters….”   Among those adherents were members of the “Tiro el Bersaglio [Target Shooting] - General Garibaldi” militia.  By law Independent militias could not exist in Louisiana without explicit authorization of the Governor.  Otherwise their marches, drilling and meetings were forbidden.  An exception was made in the case of a handful of organizations, including the Tiro el Bersaglio, on the basis of a promise to be mustered into State service upon an emergency call of the Governor.  Patorno was their elected captain.

Whatever sense of satisfaction Antonio felt in his personal and professional life, the year 1890 would change everything.  New Orleans was undergoing a period lawlessness, corruption and unrest.  On the night of October 15, as the New Orleans police chief, David Hennessy, shown here, was walking home he was gunned down on the street.  As he lay dying he is reputed to have whispered, “The dagoes did it.”   Rumors abounded of Mafia involvement.  A mass arrest of Italian-Americans and Italian migrant workers followed.

From his position of leadership, Patorno vigorously argued against the arrests.  At the same time he deplored the Hennessy murder.  He told a Daily Picayune reporter that as a New Orleans citizen and merchant he would do all in his power to “support and protect the honor and welfare of the city.” Among those taken was his brother, Charles, who is said to have had a strong resemblance to Antonio.  Although he was among nineteen men subsequently indicted by a grand jury, Charles was not tried among an initial group of nine accused — but kept locked up.  

In an attempt to exculpate the Italians, Patorno helped circulate a letter from a prison inmate in Baton Rouge that claimed five Americans had killed the police chief.  It named names.  Turned over to the District Attorney, existence of the letter was ignored.  Begun on February 16, 1891, The trial was conducted in a circus-like atmosphere.  One of the accused, possibly mentally ill, confessed and implicated others, but later retracted.  He is the man standing in the newspaper illustration below.

As Washington’s birthday approached the Governor ordered all the New Orleans militia to march in commemoration.  Because February 22 was a work day the response was meager.  Only the Tiro el Bersaglio turned out in full force, possibly to show the patriotism of Italian citizens.  With Captain Patorno at their head, they marched but found themselves dogged by boys jeering “Who killa de chief?” and throwing dirt clods at Patorno’s men.  Shaken, the saloonkeeper considered returning to the armory but decided to stay the course, even amid the mudslinging, while warning his men against any retaliation.

In a decision rendered on the afternoon of March 13,  the New Orleans jury found six of the defendants not guilty and could not reach agreement on the other three and a mistrial declared on their cases.  The next day a mob with guns gathered at the statue of Henry Clay on Canal Street and were whipped into a frenzy by their leaders.  The lynch mob broke into the jail and shot on the spot or took out and hanged eleven men, all Italians.  They included those tried and acquitted, those on whom the jury had deadlocked and others who were awaiting trial. Only eight of the nineteen arrested survived the lynch mob.  Among them was Charles Patorno.

After a New Orleans grand jury exonerated the mob leaders on May 5, the clamor of public opinion in Italy reached a fever pitch. The Italian ambassador demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect Italians and provide restitution.  When Secretary of State James Blaine, left, seemed to temporize, the ambassador went home, triggering rumors of war between the two countries.  Italy boasted a navy considerably more potent than the U.S. and the Atlantic seaboard was woefully unprotected.  The threat passed when President Benjamin Harrison ordered a U.S. government award of $25,000 (equivalent to over $600,000 today) to the families of Italian citizens who had been lynched.

The story of Hennessy’s murder and ensuing events is narrated in detail in the book “The Crescent City Lynchings” by reporter and writer Tom Smith (The Lyons Press, Guilford Conn. 2007.)  While Smith gives Patorno only a peripheral role, another author, Professor Daniela Jager at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in an article identifies him as a central figure in the tragic events.

Prof. Jager suggests that Patorno’s faction in the New Orleans Democratic Party represented a “distinct threat” to the party establishment.  She discusses the efforts of Patorno’s Italian supporters to dominate the city’s fruit trade. “But it could also be argued this was simply evidence of a new urban machine on the rise, based on political, economic, and ethnic ties,” she writes.  She asks:  “Was the Patorno political faction of the Regular Democrats responsible for Hennessy’s murder?”  She then trots out a few speculations to back up her premise that the culprits were, indeed, Patorno's adherents.  In the end, however, she admits that the role of the whiskey dealer’s supporters in the crime “will never be known for certain.”

I find Prof. Jager’s analysis highly speculative and unconvincing given other accounts. In his book Smith does not even include Patorno in his long list of “key characters.”  Certainly Antonio Patorno went on with his life and successful business career without further major incident.  The 1910 census found the family living in the French Quarter not far from Patorno’s place of business.  The family grouping included Antonio, his wife Virginia, sons Antonio Jr. and John, John’s wife Louisa, their son Anton, and Virginia’s sister Antoinette.  They were living in a magnificent mansion that Patorno had purchased at 915 Royal Street.  Shown here, it currently is a luxury hostelry called The Cornstalk Hotel, after the surrounding wrought iron fence, painted to resemble cornstalks. 

By this time Patorno had moved his saloon and liquor business from Dumaine Street to 900 Chartres, the  building shown here as it looks today.  Both sons Antonio Jr. and John were working for him.  Because Louisiana remained reliably “wet” while other Southern states adopted prohibition, Patorno’s trade likely continued to be brisk over ensuing years.  

As he aged, Antonio’s health deteriorated and he died in September 1919 at the age of 69.  He was interred in New Orleans famous “above ground” Metairie Cemetery in the Patorno/Sparico tomb, shown here.  Patorno’s name is engraved in the marble.  His wife Virginia, who died in 1934, also lies within the sepulchre.

Thus ends the story behind the jug, the image that opened this post.  What happened during those few fateful months in New Orleans will continue to be discussed and debated as a shameful chapter in American history.  Within that discourse the role played by Antonio Patorno, whiskey man, likely will remain a subject of controversy.

Note:  Prof. Jager’s article on the New Orleans lynchings appeared the 2002 issue of the publication “Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik,” available in translation through JSTOR.  She was associated with the Institute for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck.