Word: willebrandtized
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...months ago, worn, tired, looking at least ten years older, Mrs. Willebrandt resigned her office. Her division, with 100 assistants, was the Department's largest. Close to 10,000 U. S. agents (Prohibition, Customs, Coast Guard) were in the field and at sea working to enforce Prohibition, on Congressional appropriations of approximately $20,000,000 per year. Arrests averaged 75,000 per year, with about 70,000 cases turned over to Mrs. Willebrandt for prosecution. Government was getting convictions in about 75% of the cases tried. Instead of dwindling on the horizon as a political and moral issue, Prohibition...
This month Mrs. Willebrandt, private citizen, has been telling what she knows about Prohibition. Her articles, syndicated by Publicist David Lawrence's alert Current News Features, Inc., have been appearing in the New York Times, Chicago Daily News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer & many another. Following is a synopsis of her revelations, remedies, sentiments...
General Thesis. Mrs. Willebrandt believes that: 1) Prohibition is not effectively enforced; 2) Prohibition can be effectively enforced; 3) Imperfect as it is, Prohibition has materially lessened liquor...
Politics is "the greatest handicap in the enforcement of Prohibition . . . most responsible for its failures." Observed Mrs. Willebrandt: "Politics and liquor are as inseparable a combination as beer and pretzels." Though she did not name the late great Boies Penrose, she cited the fact that $250,000 in cash was found in a safe deposit box on his death and insinuated that this was "dirty money" for the political manipulation of Prohibition enforcement in Pennsylvania. She recalled appeals made by politicians for such prominent convicted 'leggers as George Remus (Cincinnati) and the La Montagne brothers (Manhattan). Declared Mrs. Willebrandt...
Agents. Politics caused the appointment as Dry Agents of unfit, untrained men "as devoid of integrity and honesty as the bootlegging fraternity." Most of them, said Mrs. Willebrandt, were of the "ward heeler type." "The Government is committing a crime against the public when it pins a badge of police authority on and hands a gun to a man of uncertain character, limited intelligence or without giving systematic training." Mrs. Willebrandt condemned "as atrocious, wholly unwarranted and entirely unnecessary some of the killing by prohibition agents." But she argued that 'leggers are often desperate characters; she cited the case...