Two days before Memorial Day a century ago, The Rev. Wilbur F. Berry, superintendent of the Christian Civic League of Maine, climbed into the pulpit of the Columbia Street Baptist Church and launched a new round in the old battle to get Bangor to enforce the state’s 60-year-old prohibition law.
An election was coming up and the city’s newspapers were more than happy to join the fray to see whether dry Republicans or local option Democrats would be elected.
Newspaper reporters loved Berry. The Waterville minister, who was the church’s guest minister that morning, was a master of colorful expressions illustrated by dramatic statistics.
The Queen City of the East had turned into a “Modern Babylon,” said the large headline over Berry’s charges in the Bangor Daily News that Sunday morning in 1916. Based on a count of the “internal revenue liquor stamps” that Bangor saloon keepers purchased annually so they could get cross-border shipments of booze, there were 108 saloons in town operated by “a handful of robbers.” These profiteers collected nearly $800,000 annually under the watchful eye of corrupt city officials who, Berry alleged, shared in the profits.
Besides all those saloons, which included some drug stores where liquor was sold for medicinal purposes, there were “gambling resorts” and brothels. Some of the “gambling dens” were located in legitimate stores “bristling with punch boards and gambling machines.” An additional $50,000 to $60,000 a year was collected from gambling with “no adequate return.”
Yes, the saloons closed promptly at 10 p.m. under city rules, but that was just a sign of collusion with public officials determined to bypass the state’s prohibition law as long as liquor dealers kept a lid on things.
Berry compared the liquor trade and associated evils to a disease. “The smallpox victim is recognized as a danger to the community and is promptly segregated, and yet the prostitute, the saloon and the gambling den infect community life just as surely and with as deadly certainty as smallpox germs,” Berry, a well-known figure in the state’s prohibition movement, preached.
The night before his talk at the church, Berry had taken a walk through downtown Bangor. “…as I swung into Water Street from Pickering Square, I heard the sound of music. Two wandering musicians — a boy who sang and another who played the accordion — were giving a concert. There were 50 in the crowd around them and at least 20 of these 50 were more or less under the influence of liquor,” he reported.
That same night a Bangor Daily News reporter had been out patrolling the streets looking for debauchery. WHERE WERE THE POLICE? the headline over his short story asked.
“On Saturday night the streets of Bangor were fairly swarming with drunken men,” he wrote. He described clusters of drunks on Exchange, State and Harlow streets involved in noisy arguments “emitting torrents of the filthiest talk imaginable.”
On Monday afternoon, after the Bangor Daily News stories hit the streets, the anti-prohibition Bangor Daily Commercial delivered a counter punch. “The News evidently feels that there is a political campaign coming on and that it must stir things up, so cheerfully assists the man from Waterville [Berry] in besmirching the good name of our city.”
As usual, the Commercial blamed the clusters of drunken men in the streets on the “presence of thousands of wood laborers who are foreigners and who are even unable to speak English.” These woodsmen passed through Bangor several times a year to and from the logging camps and the river drives far to the north.
They lived “in cheap boarding houses run for foreigners,” where inexpensive liquor was made available. The police fought constantly against these dives with some success as evidenced by fewer prisoners in the county jail.
“We are tired of having the presence of these alien woodsmen, who cannot speak English, made the text for a discourse that pictures Bangor as a ‘modern Babylon,’” the newspaper ranted.
The Bangor Daily News thundered back the next morning, May 30, Memorial Day. Its editorial was entitled DENYING WHAT EVERYBODY KNOWS. The Bangor Daily Commercial’s attack was “disgusting” and “hypocritical.”
“Now, everyone knows that Bangor is overrun with bar rooms. The Commercial knows it. And overrun with dives of all shades of character, from the plain booze kitchen to the hideous road house and the flaring, brazen ‘joint’ in the business streets. The Commercial knows this, or it doesn’t know its business as a newspaper,” the editorial said.
It continued: “Everybody knows that gambling has come to be one of the chief industries of Bangor — gambling of all sorts, from plain poker … to the mean little frauds like the ‘punch boards’ and those universal leeches, the baseball pools. The Commercial knows these things or it is dead and buried as far as current intelligence is concerned.”
Slot machines, which “drain the pockets of poor workingmen” and “tempt boys and young men to steal from their employers,” continued to exist despite periodic promises by the police to put them out of business.
The reduced population at the county jail was the result of fewer arrests, not fewer drunks. Public intoxication remained Bangor’s biggest crime. “Is there anyone so simple in this town that he must have that artificial circumstance explained to him?” the newspaper asked.
Federal prohibition was just a few years away and debate on the subject was heating up across the country. That afternoon in Bangor, the Memorial Day orator, Patrick H. Gillen, a local lawyer, devoted part of his speech to condemning liquor abuse.
He called “the drink evil” the greatest menace to American happiness and prosperity. “The great struggle of the future, he declared, is against intemperance in every form that vitiates and debauches our American manhood.”
That same afternoon the Bangor Daily Commercial offered another broadside, repeating everything it had already said.
The Bangor Daily News’ response the next morning, May 31, is most interesting today for its detailed defense of the loggers, who were often blamed for the nightly drunken spectacle downtown that had become a staple of Bangor life at certain times of the year.
The Bangor Daily Commercial was welcome “to all the ridicule it can earn by its silly attempt to saddle all the blame for the sins of a city run wild upon the backs of the woodsmen,” who were occasionally there in large numbers, but not at the moment and who had very little money to spend at any time.
“These men seldom leave the immediate vicinity of their boarding houses, which are clustered chiefly in the block bounded by lower Exchange, Hancock, French and Washington streets, or in Hancock Street above Pine,” the editorial said.
“They flock by themselves and seldom bother anyone else. They do not play poker or patronize the pools. They do not wear modern city clothes, smoke cigarettes and infest the uptown corners. They do not go joy riding with lady friends in public motor cars. They are not to be found lying in a drunken stupor upon the lawns of State Street, waiting for the Old Town [trolley] cars … They are quite apart from the rabble that makes the streets of Bangor daily and nightly, at all times of the year, disagreeable, often dangerous, to passers-by.”
The uproar created by Berry’s speech at the Columbia Street Baptist Church had apparently touched off a backlash in the political backrooms of the city, if a vaguely written story in the Bangor Daily News on June 1 is any indication. Notice had been sent out from the sheriff’s office, the paper proclaimed, to tone down the baseball pools and close up the barrooms on Memorial Day or to at least “keep shady.”
Two of the “principal card room men” had been summoned to City Hall and ordered to stop talking about “the success of the system” and to stop selling liquor by 10 p.m.
They were told, “Some of the boys are kickin’ — see!”
“And they saw of course.”
“Those who fancied that the Star Eyed Goddess of Reform had severed diplomatic relations with the town are just that much behind the times,” the reporter concluded.
But it would take two more years before Penobscot County Sheriff T. Herbert White, one of the major targets of the reformers, would be removed from office by the next governor and his executive council for failing to enforce the state’s prohibition law.
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