Depending on your view of alcohol consumption, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was either a much-needed boon to the country's moral fiber or an ill-conceived, unenforceable boondoggle.
In reality, the amendment, and the Volstead Act that outlined its enforcement, did little to outlaw commercial alcohol consumption from 1920 to 1933.
Prohibition was a result of a growing temperance movement and from alcohol retail problems. But from the start, people in and around Dubuque, as in much of the country, found ways to get around the rules -- when taverns closed, they slipped into speakeasies, where alcohol was supplied by organized crime, or they bought homemade booze from local bootleggers.
"Dubuque was known as 'Hoochland' in the rest of the state. The dry inland Republicans were always hollering about the bootleggers around Dubuque because it was such a Democratic town," said Carl Breson, formerly of Dubuque, who as a teenager helped his great-grandfather, Louis Smith, with his bootlegging operation.
For 17 years, Prohibition laws caused organized
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For instance, Chicago mobster Al Capone set up the Bon-Bon Inn south of East Dubuque, Ill. The establishment became a wildly popular watering hole. Bootlegged booze, however, often was unsafe and expensive.
Governments spent scarce funds trying to enforce widely disliked laws. During the Depression, national and state lawmakers began to realize the potential revenue and new employment that could come from a revitalized liquor industry. So 75 years ago, in 1933, one by one, the states' conventions ratified the 21st Amendment, effectively repealing the 18th -- the only time in U.S. history that a constitutional amendment has been repealed.
On Monday. July 10, 1933, both Illinois and Iowa lawmakers voted to support repealing Prohibition. In Iowa's crowded statehouse chambers, Governor Clyde Herring told the cheering crowd that it was "a vote for temperance as opposed to prohibition," and promised "strict government regulation and control" of alcohol when the 18th Amendment was voted out of force.
When Prohibition was ended at the national level on Dec. 5, 1933, Iowans still were out of luck, however. State liquor laws prohibiting liquor sales, called "bone-dry statutes," remained in force (excepting 3.2 beer). With folks in the wet states of Illinois and Wisconsin celebrating right across the river, Dubuquers fled eastward in huge numbers to drink with them. It took until March 8 of the following year for Iowa to become one of the original 'control' or 'monopoly' states with direct control over the wholesale and retail distribution of all alcoholic beverages, except beer.
The end of Prohibition signaled the end of the underground world of bootlegging, an often-brutal world that nonetheless supported many local families who faced tough economic times without the extra cash it brought in.
Confessions of a sugar runner
"Everybody was a bootlegger; those without jobs made it and sold it, and those with jobs bought it."
Carl Breson remembers the pervasiveness of illegal alcohol in and around Dubuque during Prohibition. Breson's family had lived in Dubuque for four generations when he was born into the fifth in 1915.
Now 93 and living in Bedford, Texas, Breson talked about his experiences helping various bootlegging family members during Prohibition. His great-grandfather was known as "one of the best hoochmakers around" and his uncle learned the fine craft of distilling whiskey in Tennessee, he recalled.
"They would find a little clearing on a remote island, not so big that it could be seen from the (Mississippi) river, to set up their still. First they charred a barrel by burning rubbing alcohol in it," Breson said. The char of a barrel imparts color and flavor to the alcohol fermenting in it.
"The first liquor out of the still was called 'white mule' or 'white lightning,' and it was poisonous. Some people drank it and they went blind."
A lot of the home-brewed alcohol ended up in "hooch joints" -- private homes where it was secretly sold -- and not just to working-class stiffs.
"I never saw rich people who didn't have all the whiskey they wanted," Breson said.
As a child, Breson and other youngsters searched alleys and around light poles -- places drinkers often hid out -- for empty bottles that they then sold back to the bootleggers. By the time he was a teenager, Breson regularly carried boatloads of sugar out to his grandfather's stills on Pearl Island near Dubuque. But the moonshine artists kept quiet about their illegal activities around the family's womenfolk (Breson's mother and grandmother were very much opposed to alcoholic beverages of any kind).
"I saw Eliot Ness once. He was with a whole bunch of guys who drove over the bridge and said they were hunting for stills," said Breson of the famed Chicago Prohibition agent. "You couldn't bribe the 'Prohi-men,' but you could work with the state men," Breson said, adding that Dubuque County Sheriff deputies and city police could be found at Saturday night poker games where illegal whiskey flowed freely.
Because most Dubuquers agreed with Breson that the 18th Amendment was "the most unpopular law ever made," local law enforcement officials did little to enforce it, he said.
When Prohibition ended, Breson's family, like a lot of bootlegging dynasties, lost a major source of income.
"We were poorer after Prohibition," he said.
Many bootleggers soon opened saloons and taverns.
Bootleggers' lives
Hiding his hooch and supplies under his fishing gear, Patricia Jochum's grandfather ran a successful bootlegging operation on various Mississippi River islands.
"He was a fisherman, but on the side he bootlegged," said Jochum, 78, of Asbury, who heard of her grandfather's exploits from her parents. "He sold to Chicago mobsters and in Platteville and other Wisconsin towns."
Once, the rum runner got caught and spent time in jail.
"But his cell was never locked. He played cards with the jailers and sold liquor to the deputies," she said.
After Prohibition ended, the smuggler got a job managing a "key club," a private nightclub.
Fascinated by the bootlegging stories passed down in her family, Jochum decided to write about them. "River's End," the first book in a trilogy, was self-published last year. The second book, "River's End: the Deception," will be published later this summer.
"It's about a young girl who tries to escape from her father and ends up in the bootlegging business with him and her husband. And it's set in Dubuque in the 1930s, before the dam was built," said Jochum, whose husband, Charles, also ran sugar up the river to island stills as a youngster.
The books incorporate details about illegal whiskey distilling, the dangers of rum running and the often-futile efforts of federal revenue agents to hunt down the bootleggers. Jochum's narrative describes the violence that was an integral part of the business and the effects of unchecked drunkenness on families, from physical abuse to financial hardship.
The end of Prohibition caused an immense sigh of relief in some bootlegging circles, Jochum said.
"It was a very stressful business."
Word spread fast
Although Bill Meissner never worked the stills or helped the bootleggers in his family, he heard the stories.
"My great uncle bootlegged from the first day of Prohibition until the end. Once, he was in a running gun battle with the feds. He was never caught, but his son was, and he made a deal with the feds to go to jail in his son's place," said Meissner, 76, of Dubuque.
Kimbel's Island, Stumpf Island and City Island were popular hooch-making sites, he said, while the drinking public would sneak into the riverbank hamlets of White City, Wis., and Black City, Ill., to buy and drink the illegal brew. The two towns were "colorful with girls and gambling and lots of incidents," he recalled hearing.
"Bootlegging was so widespread it was just unbelievable," Meissner said. But few Dubuquers got apprehended because of the grassroots network that alerted folks around town when federal revenue agents arrived in town.
"The feds always came in the same cars and they always stayed at the Julien (Inn), so word spread quickly by word-of-mouth," Meissner said.
For better or worse, Americans have legally consumed alcohol for the past three-quarters of a century, and the violence, chaos and crime that marked Prohibition now are distant memories.
Most of the people involved, like many of the islands where they labored, now are gone.
