Beale Street Dynasty by Preston Lauterbach

Author:Preston Lauterbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Mayor Crump’s early days in office overlapped with the arrival of a new law in the land of Tennessee, expressed in one staunch word: Prohibition. The legal prohibition of alcohol had evolved out of the temperance movement, embodied in such national grassroots organizations as the American Temperance Society and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, both founded in the nineteenth century to encourage individual abstinence from liquor. The issue achieved significant political traction in 1881, when Kansas outlawed alcohol in its state constitution.

Tennessee banned booze and beer in 1909, initially via the “four-mile law,” which criminalized the sale or consumption of intoxicating beverages within four miles of a school, and later via a bill that outlawed alcoholic beverage manufacturing. These measures emanated not from Tennessee’s urban centers but from its rural constituencies, and they either created or amplified a sense of rivalry between the largely pastoral state and its few cities. As anti-alcohol factions gained strength in town, anti-Prohibition forces developed rhetoric to sway the masses. The city of Memphis availed itself quite naturally to those who opposed Prohibition. Rather than enforce the four-mile law, Memphis might sooner have banned schools.

Of course the great flaw of Prohibition—the disconnect between the ideal of alcohol prohibition in the minds of its proponents and the reality of prohibition in practice—is that it directly led to flagrant, widespread illegal activity. Bootleggers supported Prohibition with the enthusiasm of a temperance evangelist. Circumstances in Memphis in 1910, a decade before national Prohibition took effect across the country, foreshadowed the rise of organized crime in conjunction with illegal liquor.

Instead of following this onerous law to the letter, the mandated reformer Crump ignored it, and Memphis became Prohibition’s worst-case scenario. After a year of Prohibition, a reporter from St. Louis named Silas Bent investigated Memphis, wishing to observe the social ravages of this law. And where might a visiting reporter witness the corruption that clings to restricted booze? “In the district where vice flourishes openly, along Gayoso street, from Third to Wellington, and along Rayburn boulevard, from Beale to Linden avenues,” Silas Bent explained, adding, “I saw policemen enter saloons with women, and saw women stand with men at bars and drink. It is the boast of some of the saloon proprietors in this district that they never close their doors.”12

Brightly illuminated signs and strings of electric lights beckoned Silas Bent to John Persica’s Garden Theater. Inside, he noted the prizefight advertisements and the stage at the back of the dance hall, “where moving pictures are shown, with indecent vaudeville turns at intervals.” He watched a stout blond woman walk into the dance hall, holding the tasseled chord of a policeman’s stick. “The stick was over her shoulder and the policeman held the other end.” They found a table, through laughter and warm-hearted jests, and were served drinks, at no cost.

Following the indecent vaudeville, the floor was cleared of chairs and sprinkled with sand, and women wearing skirts that failed to conceal their knees led patrons out to dance.

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