Spotters in town for Dr. Berry? A headline in the Bangor Daily News on June 25, 1915, asked that provocative question. The answer was a resounding yes.
Dr. Wilber Berry, superintendent of the Christian Civic League of Maine, had asked Gov. Oakley Curtis for a public hearing to inform Maine’s chief executive of “lawless conditions” in some Maine counties.
“He didn’t specify which counties, but it wouldn’t be an overwhelming surprise to learn that he included Penobscot among them,” wrote a cynical reporter for the Bangor Daily News who had probably been covering the liquor wars in Bangor for longer than he cared to recall.
The Christian Civic League had been conducting a campaign against Maine liquor interests for years in an effort to get officials to enforce the state’s first-in-the-nation prohibition law. Bangor in particular had been targeted many times in the past, and it was no surprise that “spotters” — people searching out saloons to report to the authorities — were back in the Queen City.
It didn’t take much of an effort to locate these places, which dotted the downtown, often with doors wide open to the street.
The plot thickened the next day. The newspaper reported that by unanimous vote the Minister’s Conference of Bangor had sent letters to Penobscot County Sheriff T. Herbert White and Bangor Mayor Frank Robinson asking them to enforce the law.
White had recently defeated the former sheriff, J. Fred O’Connell, who had managed to offend both prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists by seizing train car loads of liquor, but leaving too many saloons open at the same time.
Robinson, a Democrat who owed his election mostly to the anti-prohibition interests, had recently defeated the former mayor, John G. Utterback, a zealous prohibition enforcer.
Now the Christian League was back, testing the political inclinations of not only the state’s governor, but local officials as well.
The hearing before Gov. Curtis was reported in the Bangor Daily News on July 1. Berry revealed that he and his fellow spotters had investigated three counties — Androscoggin, Penobscot and Knox — where reports of abuse were rampant.
The spotters had been active in Bangor multiple times between April and June. They had walked unidentified into dozens of saloons and bought bottles of booze with no effort whatsoever. These saloons included the Manhattan Café on Exchange Street, one of the city’s best restaurants.
Much drunkenness was witnessed. “On Haymarket Square a policeman was seen in a saloon drinking at the bar,” Dr. Berry reported. Today Haymarket Square is a bank parking lot across the street from Pickering Square, another hot spot in the city’s liquor trade.
Dozens of places were identified in Bangor. Several more were visited in South Brewer and Old Town. There was no evidence of any enforcement.
“In all places visited in South Brewer, Old Town and Bangor there were bars and all the equipment of saloons. There were no watchers at the doors, no evidence of fear on the part of the bar keepers…” Dr. Berry reported. In other words, Bangor was “wide open.”
Under questioning, Gov. Curtis, like many Democrats, said he believed in local option, not statewide prohibition as decreed in the state’s liquor law. He also made it clear that he intended to do nothing about Dr. Berry’s hardly unique revelations, because he did not have the power to do anything.
Paraphrasing the governor, the reporter wrote, “He could order the sheriffs to enforce the law certainly, but what if they didn’t obey? In that event he might instruct the attorney general to bring action against them … but suppose the attorney general wouldn’t?”
Finally, in the event of open defiance by his subordinates, he would have two remedies — he could declare a special session of the Legislature, or he could declare a state of mob violence and order out the militia.
While this discussion was going on “ripples of satirical amusement swept through the council chambers.” The last governor had tried impeaching sheriffs (including Sheriff Emerson in Penobscot County) and failed to win re-election, just like the former activist mayor of Bangor who went on an unpopular enforcement rampage.
“Mr. Berry, if I can help it I don’t intend to make myself a laughing stock over the prohibitory law,” Gov. Curtis responded. “For 20 years there has been no enforcement in Maine. Certain papers — especially Republican papers — have claimed that there has been — spasmodically in certain places. Their claims don’t make it so … I won’t knock my head against a stone wall. Why should I give orders to officials who are not obliged to obey them?”
Meanwhile, the drumbeat of protest continued in Bangor. On July 2, it was reported in the Bangor Daily News that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Bangor chapter had endorsed the urgings of the local ministers, calling on the mayor and the sheriff to enforce the law.
The next day, Mayor Frank Robinson responded, echoing much of what Gov. Curtis had to say.
“I have lived in Bangor a good many years — more than most of the men in City Hall, and I can’t recall the time when those so disposed couldn’t buy all the liquor they wanted … Liquor has always been sold and drunk in Bangor, and I believe it beyond the power of any individual to make the city dry,” he said. “I must confess I was in sympathy with Gov. Curtis when he said: ‘I don’t intend to knock my head against a stone wall.’”
Robinson said he didn’t condone drunkenness and immorality. In fact, arrests for drunkenness were down. Saloons were operating within rules laid down by the city, closing within designated hours and so on.
Instead of shutting down saloons that followed the city’s rules, the police were after a different class of liquor dealer — those that operated on the side streets and outskirts of the city, those who served liquor in “kitchen dives” and cheap lodging houses “where immorality is encouraged, and robbery and other law violations are not infrequent.”
He gave one example known as the Townsend “farm.” Billy Townsend’s “famous roadhouse” on Stillwater Avenue (according to reports it had recently been sold to another proprietor) had recently been the scene of a police raid. Three young women, “habitués of the place,” had been arrested as were the owners.
Also caught up in the dragnet were two “respectable” young men — University of Maine students — and their dates, one “the daughter of a state official.” They were presumed to be oblivious to the true nature of this den of iniquity. Such “vicious resorts” were the mayor’s targets.
The prohibition movement was picking up steam nationally. Opponents of a federal law were constantly pointing to Maine as an example of a state that had tried prohibition and failed. The antics that had occurred in Bangor during the past few years were well known nationally.
Proponents like Boston University’s president, Lemuel H. Murlin, however, were not convinced that Maine’s failure proved much. “Prohibition in Maine has been run on partisan and political lines — real prohibition has never been given a chance in that state,” he said at a meeting celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Temperance Society the Bangor Daily Commercial reported on May 17.
If only he had discussed the matter with Gov. Curtis and Mayor Robinson, he might have changed his mind. Politics never left the Maine scene, and as a result prohibition never worked.
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.