LIQUOR: Creeping Prohibition

Over the length & breadth of the U.S., citizens who like hard liquor are finally beginning to believe the awful truth: the U.S. whiskey supply is really vanishing—not just in war-boom towns or special-situation cities—but everywhere.

Bootleggers, highjackers and just plain thirsty visitors from the drought areas finally dried up the wet areas too. Minneapolis and St. Paul ran out of whiskey because bootleggers bought up the local supply and smuggled it to Seattle, where parched citizens gladly paid up to $8 a pint. In Washington, D.C., organized ‘”booze-buyer” gangs stripped store shelves of liquor for resale in Virginia and Maryland. Legal whiskey outlets ran out of stock in the states bordering Prohibitionist Mississippi (where OPA officials are “utterly powerless” because “theoretically there is no whiskey in Mississippi”). Even liquorish Manhattan scraped the bottom of its whiskey barrel: out-of-towners from the drought-struck sticks (plus jam-packed local bars) drained away almost all of New York City’s bottled-in-bond.

Dry Story. Newspapers from coast to coast last week woke up to the peril all at once. Al Capone’s Chicago hit the week’s journalistic high when the Hearst Herald-American assigned six reporters, some armed with revolvers, to nose out back-alley stills, track down highjackers, and publicize ceiling violators. They seemed to find plenty to justify the American’s screaming red headlines: highjackings running up to $100,000 a month, a wave of liquor-store holdups, petty racketeers glad to blab about Michigan farmers who “buy anything short of a hair rinse,” bellhops getting $12-15 a Pint from hotel guests.

But the strictly criminal, gun-toting aspects of ‘the new “creeping Prohibition” are minor phases of the drought. The main area is in violations of OPA regulations:

1) sales of liquor at prices above ceilings; 2) pressure-sales of wine, sherry, raw Cuban gin or Puerto Rican rum before any whiskey conies out from under the counter. In Los Angeles retailers frantically tried to switch their customers.from bour bon to tequila, which was flooding across the border because it sells for $1 a fifth in Mexico v. $4.10 in the U.S.

Retailers blamed wholesalers for their troubles, wholesalers blamed distillers, and distillers blamed the public for: i) supporting black markets, 2) refusing to switch from whiskey to relatively plentiful drinks. “The public is behaving very badly about the liquor situation,” moaned a Hiram Walker man in Chicago. “When they go to a store and can’t get butter, they realize there’s a war on. But when they can’t get whiskey, they raise hell.”

Statistics & Suspicions. One big reason the public behaved badly was that the distilling industry, trying to stem the panic, has stressed statistics that seem to prove that the U.S. has up to a four-year supply. On Sept. 30, the U.S. had 406,000,000 gal. of whiskey in stock v. 1942!s consumption of around 92,000,000 gal. That is all there will be until war’s end and then some, since whiskey makers are 100% converted to the manufacture of industrial alcohol.

But the U.S. reserve supply is nowhere near as big as it sounds: almost 100,000,000 gal. will disappear in “shrinkage” and evaporation before it gets bottled, another 100,000,000 gal. is being held as a last-ditch reserve for blending with new stocks, come peace. And around one-third of the remaining 200,000,000 gal. is not yet two years old. Whiskey consumption is at the rate of 87,000,000 gal. a year.

Even so, dopesters suspected that things were not quite so bad as they seemed last week. Their grounds for suspicion: 1) distillers, already high up in the 1943 excess-profits-tax brackets, have almost no incentive for releasing stocks before the new tax year begins; 2) retailers, whose markup goes on after Federal and state liquor taxes, have every incentive to wait for Congress to decide on a higher liquor excise; 3) if some extra blending spirits could be found—perhaps in Cuba—existing stocks could be stretched, sold under new labels for about as much as straight whiskey brings now.

Here to Stay. If all these suspicions turn out to be right, a bit more whiskey may turn up on retailers’ shelves next year. But, though today’s drought may be slightly exaggerated, the whiskey shortage is here for the duration.