Prohibition Pittsburgh

family.

Introduction

I was in high school when I came across an old newspaper story about an explosion that ripped apart my grandfather’s house in the 1920s. The article attributed the explosion to a faulty coal furnace. I showed the item to my father, who laughed. The still blew up. Dad was making moonshine in the basement.

Both of my grandfathers liked the taste of moonshine after working long hours hunched over in cold, damp coal mines. I grew up along the Allegheny River in the industrial Allegheny Valley north of Pittsburgh, an area once dotted with coal mines, steel mills, glass factories and foundries. My grandfather Andrew Gazarik emigrated from what is now Slovakia but then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He came to America and brought his drinking habits with him.

Drinking was part of his life in a grimy, dirt-poor village in Slovakia. He likely drank home-brew called palenky, distilled from fruits. He also drank a Slovak gin known as borovicka or hriato—a beverage made from palenky, honey, butter and pork lard—while exchanging toasts of na zdravie, to your health, with his friends.

My maternal grandfather, Zygmunt Maleski, also a coal miner, came from Szylowo, Poland, and probably drank concoctions of Polish moonshine known as bimber or ksiezycowka. His home was raided during Prohibition by agents who suspected he was operating a still, but the agents had the wrong house. They wanted the home next door.

Whenever my grandfather came home drunk, his three daughters advised my grandmother to "leave tata alone. Let him sleep it off. My grandmother, a stubborn Pole, disregarded their advice. She got right up in his face, recalled an uncle. He liked his booze. He just loved to drink the moonshine." Even though she spent years owning a bar, my grandmother never tasted a drop of liquor in her life.

No Beer—No Work was a popular Prohibition-era song. Library of Congress.

Pittsburgh saloons were a refuge for immigrant steelworkers and coal miners; there, they could talk to their countrymen in their own tongues and feel at home. Saloons also were a place where workers could escape the drudgery of their jobs. Liquor provided relief from their long days and brutal workweeks.

The saloon was an oasis and alcohol gave momentary relief from unrelenting toil, wrote S.J. Kleinberg in his study on working-class families.

Congressman Andrew Barchfield of Pittsburgh, who was a physician, said he represented over 100,000 coal miners and steelworkers and resented temperance advocates dictating morals to his constituents.

These people look upon alcoholic liquor as a right, inborn and God given, said Barchfield in a study commissioned by the Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association. What right does a Prohibitionist in Kansas or Alabama or Maine to command a steelworker in my district who faces 2,000-degree Fahrenheit heat at the furnace door that he may not have his beer when his heat is ended?

During Prohibition, the Protestant-led Anti-Saloon League wanted to transform society by banning saloons and speakeasies and use the law to change social and moral behavior. The mostly Catholic Slavic population believed the law was aimed at Catholicism. One Slovak priest preached that Prohibition was a sin. I say give the people good food, good fresh air and good wine and beer and whiskey, a priest told the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegram. Prohibition is the biggest curse a person can imagine. God will punish this country.

When federal agents in 1930 raided a speakeasy and seized sixty barrels of wine in an immigrant stronghold known as Skunk Hollow in the city’s Bloomfield neighborhood, they were stoned by a mob before police arrived to rescue them. Agents often faced drunken, hostile patrons when they conducted raids.

Agents had to contend with an irate wife of a saloon owner who accosted them with a chair. At another drinking spot, the patrons formed a human barricade to prevent agents from entering the saloon. After a federal raid on a Strip District speakeasy, angry residents slashed the tires of the agents’ cars to show their displeasure.

Protestant ministers protested the Slavs’ habit of drinking, dancing and fighting at weddings, christenings and funerals, arguing that ethnic groups held festivities under the guise of Christianity and the carousing should be abolished if a means can be evolved to carry it out.

Alcohol was as important as food at family gatherings and religious ceremonies. A host was considered inhospitable if he didn’t offer his guest a drink on arrival. If a guest rejected a refill, you filled his glass anyway because you knew he was just being polite in rejecting your hospitality.

When someone died, there were toasts to the deceased at the wake. Liquor, said a priest, brought a little cheer into a dreary house, according to an article in The Annals of the American Academy of Police and Social Science. When a relative was married, there was a Slavic tradition in which the men at the reception paid money, knocked back a shot of whiskey and danced briefly with the bride before the next man cut in.

Rural America viewed drinking as a big-city social ill, and temperance advocates viewed saloons as the core of that problem. Money spent on drinking meant less money spent on supporting a family. The saloons, however, were places of refuge for the growing immigrant population, particularly in western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, where the city’s population grew from 235,000 in 1880 to more than 670,000 by 1930.

Prohibition Bureau officials pose beside a car used by Prohibition agents. Library of Congress.

Jews, Italians, Slavs, Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholics arrived here and were looked down on by the wealthy Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who ruled the city financially, economically and culturally. The Scotch-Irish believed poverty was the result of laziness and sin and that drinking was at the root of the problem.

Heavy drinking also occurred in the coal patches that dotted the region surrounding Pittsburgh. There were nearly one hundred killings related to alcohol in these towns during Prohibition, but agents were banned from entering these coal patches by the notorious Coal and Iron Police.

Labor leader Philip Murray, then vice-president of the United Mine Workers Union, blamed the coal companies for allowing notorious violations of the Volstead Act in the coal camps.

Men bootleggers and women bootleggers openly sell liquor in the camps, complained Murray to Pennsylvania lawmakers. Fights and assaults by drunken men and women no longer attract more than passing attention.

1

The Whiskey Rebellion

Western Pennsylvania sits along the Appalachian Mountain range separating the western part of the state from the east. The mountain’s endless ridges, thick forests and rugged landscape, along with its rivers and streams, made it ideal for hiding stills and making moonshine. Even before the Revolutionary War, the region had speakeasies, known as tippling houses, where thirsty travelers could wet their whistles. Bootleggers were called tippling house keepers.

Liquor was part of everyday life for the people living along the frontier. Liquor was a symbol of hospitality. Visitors were offered a pull from the jug when they arrived at a neighbor’s house. Men drank whiskey at work, before church, at weddings, at baptisms, at funerals, at house-raisings and at harvest time. As part of their daily rations, soldiers were given a gill (a quarter of a pint) of whiskey.

Even clergymen drank. One minister, about to administer confirmation, walked into a Greensburg tavern in Westmoreland County before the ceremony wearing his canonical robes and ordered a tumbler of brandy without giving offense to the faithful. Clergymen routinely were offered a drink when calling at the homes of their parishioners.

Early nineteenth-century America was a nation of drunkards, as historian William J. Rorabaugh wrote in The Alcoholic Republic. Everybody drank. Doctors, lawyers, laborers, farmhands, the clergy and factory workers all drank regularly during the day. Whiskey was considered medicine. People drank whiskey if they had a fever or were bitten by a snake. Europeans arriving in the United States drank alcohol because water was often dirty or contaminated. If they were thirsty, Americans drank beer to quench their thirst. By 1830, Americans were drinking as much as five gallons of liquor a year.

The Continental Congress was concerned about colonists’ excessive drinking and passed a resolution in 1774 encouraging colonial legislatures to enact laws curtailing the distilling of grain. The Methodists and Quakers pushed for curtailment of liquor sales. The Pennsylvania Synod of the Lutheran Church in 1797 ordered ministers to take up the cause of temperance from their pulpits. The Pittsburgh Synod went so far as to decree that alcohol should never be used except for medicinal purposes.

Pittsburgh had two dozen taverns by 1808, with names like the Rising Sun, Semple’s Tavern and the Lemon Inn where men drank slings, todys and bounces made of whiskey, cherry or jinn. Whiskey was as good as gold in the hardscrabble frontier of western Pennsylvania in the 1790s and was as much a part of the commercial life of the region as it was part of the social. Since hard currency was scarce, farmers used whiskey in place of cash to pay for merchandise or their ministers’ salaries.

American whiskey was born in western Pennsylvania, and the region served as the nation’s whiskey capital for 150 years, from the 1700s through the 1800s. More than four thousand stills were operating near streams throughout Allegheny, Westmoreland, Fayette and Washington Counties. Colonel Israel Shreve distilled whiskey in Perryopolis. Sam Thompson built a distillery along the Monongahela River in 1844. It closed during Prohibition but emerged after repeal to continue making rye until the middle of the twentieth century.

John Gibson’s Son & Company in Belle Vernon started in 1856, but Prohibition forced the company into bankruptcy. Sam Dillinger in Ruffsdale opened his distillery in 1906, producing fifty barrels of rye whiskey a day. Prohibition also put Dillinger out of business, but his company reemerged as Ruffsdale Distilling Company, producing Thos. Moore, Old Possum Hollow, Old Man, Hiram Green, Tom Keene and Old Yock Pure Rye.

The Monongahela River Valley was described in 1811 as a rich and well-settled country, according to Leland Baldwin’s Whiskey Rebels. Visitors reported that farmers cultivated wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, corn and potatoes in great abundance. It was rye, however, that was used to make whiskey, and Mon Rye was the best and greatest. Farmers in the fertile valley grew rye that was distilled into whiskey known as Monongahela Rye. Mon Rye, as it was called, was a sweeter, more robust-tasting whiskey that was allowed to age in barrels rather than swilled as soon as it was made.

Mon Rye was held in such high regard that Herman Melville mentioned the drink in Moby-Dick. ’Tis July’s immortal fourth; all fountains must run red today! Would now, it revealed New Orleans whiskey or unspeakable old Monongahela!

Early Pittsburgh was a military outpost filled with rugged frontiersmen, trappers and traders. In 1781, the town was a rural community of four hundred people, but by 1790, Pittsburgh was a bustling city of one thousand. It was slowly transforming itself from a frontier town into a commercial center. Pittsburgh was filled with log homes and muddy streets. It was prospering with ironworks, brickyards, a boatyard, a stone quarry and commercial mills. Flatboats and keelboats plied the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, which came together at the town.

After the Revolutionary War, a small group of rich men dominated the economy of western Pennsylvania. They bought land and built businesses and industries, creating even more wealth. On the lower end of the economic totem pole were small farmers, who hacked out homesteads in the thick forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Life was hard. For families settling the area, life on the frontier often meant living in poverty. To survive, farmers raised rye or distilled it to