Tag Archives: prohibition

PROHIBITION AND FAKE RABBIS.

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The Volstead Act. During Prohibition, the federal government had a very tough law prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages. However, there were a few exceptions in this law. For one thing, the government had to allow the sale of sacramental wine to Roman Catholics and Jews. This provision didn’t affect the amount of wine purchased by Catholic churches, but sales of sacramental wine by rabbis exploded. Because of the way the Catholic church is organized, anyone can’t just say: “I am a Roman Catholic priest”; however, anyone can say: “I am a rabbi.” Unlike the Catholic church, there is no supreme authority, like the Pope, in Judaism. In addition, Catholics consume sacramental wine in churches, whereas Jews consume sacramental wine at home – unsupervised. Under the Volstead Act, Jews were entitled to buy 10 gallons of wine a year for “private religious observance.” Almost as soon as the law went into effect, huge numbers of Americans suddenly discovered that they were Jews – something that they had not known before Prohibition, and that they were pious Jews as well, and that they needed sacramental wine, a lot of sacramental wine. As soon as Prohibition ended, those same people just as suddenly discovered that they weren’t Jewish after all, and sales of kosher wine returned to their pre-Prohibition levels. In 1924, Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland’s Temple Sinai complained that the number of families in Alameda claiming to be Jewish was 50 in the 1920 U.S. Census, but in 1924, over 500 families in Alameda claimed to be Jewish. Rabbi Coffee argued that the number of Jews in Alameda could not possibly have increased by 1,000% in just 4 years.

Wine Rabbis. Anyone with a rabbinical license could issue sacramental wine permits, and getting a rabbinical license was easy. In some states, it only required that a person get 10 signatures on an application form, and those signatures could come from anyone, including the applicant’s friends and relatives. As a result, the number of licensed rabbis in the United States increased tremendously during Prohibition. Most of these “wine rabbis”, as they were known, were not Jews. Many had suspiciously unJewish sounding names including Rabbis Sean and Patrick O’Connor of Boston (brothers), Rabbi Luis Mendoza of Tucson, and Rabbi Akira Matsumoto of Los Angeles. In 1922, the Jewish World newspaper reported that a Greek junk dealer in Denver made $100,000 selling kosher wine and wine permits using his rabbinical license. That’s almost $2 million in today’s money. In addition to selling wine permits, licensed rabbis could also sell sacramental wine to people directly, and they could issue sacramental wine permits to restaurants and social clubs. Of course, they charged a fee for this service, typically $200 to $500, a lot of money in the 1920s. Because it was legal to buy sacramental wine, it was much cheaper to drink wine than hard liquor or beer during Prohibition. As a result, sales of wine skyrocketed in the United States. In 1919, the year before Prohibition went into effect, California farmers used 100,000 acres of land to grow wine grapes. By 1924, that grew to 680,000 acres.

The Pseudo Rabbi Squad. The Federal Bureau of Prohibition had a ‘Pseudo-Rabbi Squad’ which tried to put a stop to this, but whenever they put a fake rabbi out of business someplace, new ones popped up elsewhere. Jewish organizations also tried to put the pseudo-rabbis out of business, fearing that they would stir up antiSemitism, which they did. The Klux Klan was at its peak of power in the 1920s. They strongly supported Prohibition and blamed bootlegging on Jews and Roman Catholic Italian and Irish gangsters. All efforts to put the pseudo-rabbis out of business failed. There was just too much money being made selling kosher wine, plus the public did not support the law, and too many policemen and politicians were taking bribes from bootleggers. The pseudo-rabbis only went out of business when Prohibition was repealed. Below is an article from the Oakland Tribune from this period.

I had assumed that most Jews knew about the story, but I was wrong. While everybody knows about the big-shot gangsters who controlled the sale of hard liquor and beer during Prohibition, people like Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano; almost nobody knows about the pseudo-rabbis. My father and his brother Sol sold bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Neither one of them claimed to be rabbis. Even though they were small time operators, my father made enough money selling bootleg booze to buy a ‘Model A’ Ford. He was one of the very few people in his family to own a car during the Great Depression. In 1933, Prohibition was repealed, and my father and his brother had to get real jobs, jobs that paid a lot less than what they had been making selling whiskey to their friends and neighbors. My father told me that Prohibition was the stupidest thing the United States did in his lifetime.

HOW DID WE GET THE INCOME TAX?

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Very few people know how we got the income tax. Nobody likes paying income tax, so who was behind the passage of the 16th Amendment? Most history teachers can’t tell you. Most CPAs can’t tell you. I’ve asked quite a few CPAs. They don’t know. Surprisingly, it was the Prohibitionists. By the late 1800s, many states had passed statewide Prohibition laws, but they were unable to get Congress to vote for a national Prohibition amendment. Even members of Congress who were committed Prohibitionists wouldn’t vote for it. The reason was that the federal government was completely dependent on liquor taxes for its financing. From the time George Washington was president until the passage of the 16th Amendment, liquor taxes were the federal government’s principal source of revenue. When I tell people just how dependent the government was on liquor taxes, they don’t believe me, so consider this quote from the IRS web site: IRS Web Site.  “From 1868 until 1913, 90 percent of all (federal) revenue came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco.”

Think of it – 90% of the federal government’s income came from taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and most of that income came from alcohol. Congress was reluctant to raise tobacco taxes too high because nearly half of all Americans still lived on farms, and it is easy to grow your own tobacco. Making liquor is much more complicated. Before Congress could vote for the Prohibition Amendment, the Prohibitionists had to find another way to finance the federal government. In 1894, the Prohibitionists got Congress to pass a federal income tax law, but in 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that a federal income tax was unconstitutional. That meant that the only way the Prohibitionists could get a federal income tax was by Constitutional amendment, and that is what they set out to do. They had allies in this. Although liberal politicians generally had little interest in Prohibition, they were very interested in doing something to reduce the tremendous wealth inequality in the U.S. at the time. This was the Gilded Age, a time when a small number of incredibly wealthy industrialists accumulated huge fortunes, men like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc.; while factory workers were living in poverty, and their poverty was getting worse. The gap between rich and poor in America had never been greater. These liberal groups allied themselves with the Prohibitionists to support the income tax amendment. So that’s how we got the income tax – it was the Prohibitionists!

Jack Daniel’s. Prohibition in the U.S. never completely went away. A number of states in the Midwest and the South have still not ratified the 21st Amendment, and there are dozens of dry counties in the United States, places where the sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited. Jack Daniel’s is the #1 selling American whiskey in the world. It is made in Lynchburg, Tennessee, a fact that the company frequently mentions in its advertising. Lynchburg is in Moore County, a dry county. That means that Jack Daniel’s cannot be sold in stores or restaurants in the county where it is made, and there are no bars or liquor stores in the county. You have to leave Moore County to buy Jack Daniel’s. Many of America’s top-selling whiskeys are made in places where it is illegal to sell alcoholic beverages. Isn’t that odd?


What Is A Jack Daniels Terrier? I once got an application to rent a house from a woman who wrote on her application form that she owned a Jack Daniels terrier. I asked her: “Don’t you mean a Jack Russell terrier?” She became enraged by my question and said: “No. Why do you landlords keep asking me that question? I know what kind of dog I own!” Then she stormed out. After she left, I looked up Jack Daniels terrier on Google, just to make sure there is no such breed. Just as I suspected, there is no such thing as a Jack Daniels terrier. I wonder how many landlords before me asked this woman the same question that I did.