In the years leading up to federal prohibition, a great moral reckoning swept the land as states rushed to jump aboard the prohibition bandwagon. In Bangor, outspoken clergymen and activist club women encouraged a new mayor elected on the independent ticket with no obligations to the city’s “wet” establishment to enforce the already existing state liquor law, as well as other laws banning vice.
Mayor John G. Utterback, a carriage dealer from Indiana, had already ordered an end to slot machines in April 1914. Chief of Police Thomas E. O’Donohue reported the following March that “today it can safely be said there is not a gambling machine in operation in this city.”
“Disorderly houses,” better known as “resorts” or houses of ill repute, also were targeted. “A general clean-up has been made of all disorderly houses with the result that more than 15 well-known places have been closed, the proprietors and inmates having left the city,” O’Donahue said in the same municipal report.
Liquor was another matter entirely, however. Maine’s prohibition law, the first in the nation, had been on the books since before the Civil War, yet Bangor was awash in booze. Many people from Bangor made money off the liquor trade and related businesses by catering to the thousands of transient loggers and other workers who passed through the city, as well as the rapidly growing number of resident immigrants from Canada and Europe.
The Queen City had become something of a joke nationally because of its seeming inability to enforce the law. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Joseph Cannon had stated during a debate that prohibition didn’t work. He had been able to get all the liquor he wanted in Bangor, he claimed.
In recent years, the actual enforcement of the so-called Maine Law in Bangor had been left to the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department, while the police department only “regulated” saloons according to rules of orderliness set by the city. Needless to say, this unwritten policy caused much confusion.
Presented with a petition signed by a large number of Bangor ministers and professors at Bangor Theological Seminary in July 1914, Utterback decided he was going to do more than regulate. But he would need an extra $5,000 to hire more policemen.
That request, not surprisingly, was crushed by austerity-minded city councilors, who reminded Utterback it was up to the sheriff to enforce prohibition, not the Bangor police.
Utterback wasn’t a man to let small obstacles stand in his way. On Oct. 26, 1914, a remarkable headline appeared at the top of page one in the Bangor Daily News: “SALOONS MUST CLOSE —- MAYOR.” The subhead said, “Utterback Issues Sweeping Order to the Police, Rigid Enforcement, Beginning Nov. 1 and Continuing So Long as He Remains in Office.”
Without any extra money, the mayor declared the police would enforce the law. He said he had no “interests” to protect and his policy would be carried out “regardless of its effect on his political fortunes.” He added that any policeman who didn’t like it could quit.
Utterback, who was vulnerable as an independent, had begun making politically inopportune and sometimes intemperate statements about the city he ran. These comments gradually antagonized many of Bangor’s powerful boosters who sought his ouster.
“Officials of other cities seem to regard Bangor as a joke,” Utterback said.
“It has been spread that there are more arrests for intoxication here, in proportion to population, than in any city in the country,” he added.
He was going to do something about it.
Two days later, Utterback briefed delegates of the State Sunday School Convention about his plans. They applauded his comments “loudly, even wildly.”
There were 175 to 180 saloons then operating in Bangor, he said. He was planning to test the common belief that many of the police were “in close affiliation” with the liquor interests. The exact nature of this “affiliation” was never discussed, but we can certainly speculate today.
In November, Utterback asked again for more money for the police force — $3,000 this time. When the next meeting of the council failed to produce a quorum, no vote could be taken. (The council finally turned down this second request in December.)
In an intemperate outburst, the mayor declared the city was “going to hell,” the Bangor Daily News reported the next morning. The mayor announced he would call a mass meeting to discuss the crisis.
The headline over the Bangor Daily News story on Nov. 13, describing the “mass meeting” at City Hall was even more damaging. It said, “THE MAYOR TELLS OF HIS TROUBLES: Occupies Entire Time at City Hall Meeting With Rambling Discourse of Complaint and Defense – Shocked at Conditions Here, Would Like to Enforce Law, But Thinks Prohibition is a Farce.” Audience members remained silent.
Meanwhile, while he was being criticized by both of the city’s newspapers, the mayor received a unanimous vote of appreciation for his efforts to suppress the liquor trade and improve “deplorable conditions” during a meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club, one of the city’s influential women’s groups, the Bangor Daily News noted on Nov. 16.
About that time, the Rev. C. W. Collier of the Hammond Street Congregational Church, delivered a sermon that seemed to some to endorse Utterback’s goals “by inference,” related the Bangor Daily News on Nov. 23. Back then, entire sermons were sometimes published in the newspapers.
Intermittent newspaper stories about liquor raids began to appear. A rumor was going around that the mayor had brought in some Boston detectives to act as “saloon spotters,” the newspaper reported on Dec. 12. They were reportedly spying on uncooperative cops as well.
Utterback delivered some more politically charged remarks to the Women’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church as reported in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 15. He said he had been disappointed in Bangor since his arrival there as a young businessman, because fellow businessmen lacked “an aggressive interest” in the city’s future as well as a cooperative spirit.
Two weeks later, in early January 1915, the Bangor Daily News reprinted a story from the Lewiston Journal containing similarly intemperate remarks. The headline read, “BITTER COMMENTS BY BANGOR’S MAYOR: Police Force in Many Ways a Joke, Containing those both Physically and Mentally Unfit, He Declares – Four Aldermen, Guided Wholly by Politics, Will Do Anything to Beat Him.”
The new sheriff, T. Herbert White, meanwhile, announced he was planning to start rigorously enforcing the liquor law beginning on Jan. 14. The next day, as many saloon keepers were busily getting rid of their stocks, the Bangor Daily News announced the era of “double enforcement” had begun.
A few days later, on Jan. 19, the Bangor Daily News said the city’s aldermen had asked the mayor to stop enforcing the liquor law altogether. Utterback ignored their resolve. In a speech to the Nineteenth Century Club, he suggested aldermen who urged the police not to enforce the law could be impeached.
The Bangor Daily News vented its disgust at the growing hysteria in an editorial titled “THE MADNESS AT CITY HALL” on Jan. 23. Utterback’s liquor policies plus his expensive new auditing system lay at the roots of the paper’s concerns.
“Bad management” had led to the expenditure of “money for all sorts of costly experiments, money for the enforcement of blue laws, money to enable the police to add their ineffective might to the general impotency of prohibition, money to juggle the accounting system. … The fantastic notions and practices of the mayor and his apparent incapacity or indifference in the direction of financial affairs, have alienated many of the visionaries who shouted for him last spring.”
Of course, a mayoral election was coming, and the Bangor Daily News was urging voters to pick a Republican, while the Bangor Daily Commercial urged a Democratic regime to return things to normalcy. The result was one of the bitterest mayoral campaigns in city history.
“BANGOR BETRAYED BY ITS GUARDIAN: Mayor Utterback’s Vilification of City That Honored Him, Spread Far and Wide, Keeps People and Business Away,” the Bangor Daily News editorialized. The mayor’s slanderous comments about the Queen City of the East had been printed in newspapers “from here to California,” the paper said on March 6.
The winner of the election, with 2,005 votes, was Frank Robinson, the Democrats’ nominee. He was a state legislator and a former executive for the Maine Central Railroad. He would die a few months later.
Utterback placed second with 1,575 votes, ahead of Republican candidate Bernhard M. Kirstein with 1,339. While he lost the election, he had defeated the Republicans, who were used to winning most of the time in Bangor. We can speculate today that this was because he had maintained the important support of a core of Republican voters who were tired of city officials allowing vice to run rampant.
The county was once again the sole enforcer of the prohibition law, while the city would return to regulating the saloons, an untenable solution to the endless prohibition problem.
Years later, between 1933 and 1935, Utterback would serve a term as a U.S. congressman. Wikipedia tells us that “Fittingly for a candidate from ‘wet’ Bangor, he made his first congressional speech in support of the repeal of Prohibition, around which he had built his campaign.” His brief tenure as Bangor’s zealous prohibition mayor wasn’t mentioned.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com.