In August 1919 the Harrisburg Telegraph published a cartoon that suggested just how far both sides on the alcohol issue exaggerated the effects of national prohibition. Using the slider in the middle of the image below, slide to the right to see a satire of the Anti-Saloon League’s wildest dreams. Slide to the left to see a satire of the anti-Prohibition camp’s darkest fears.
If the turmoil in Snyder County seemed designed to sell newspapers, the traffic of illegal liquor across the river in Northumberland County was a matter of everyday headlines. Tales of shootouts on riverside roads, hearses used to run booze in Sunbury, camouflaged shipments on train cars, basement caches in houses and bars, violent beer parties, and crates of “raisin jack” hidden in school buildings regularly appeared in local newspapers.
Philadelphia’s Public Ledger editorialized on the state of Prohibition in late 1921: “The violations are caused because of the immense pecuniary rewards of successfully running the blockade, which cause men to take chances with their liberty in order to make money fast and easily. The indifference of the public is chiefly the result of the natural disinclination of every man to go into court even as a witness when he doesn’t have to do so.” Despite the assumption that only men bootlegged or looked the other way in the face of bootlegging, the paper did capture an unspoken truth about the Prohibition era: a majority of people complied with the law in order to avoid legal trouble, and, at the same time, a majority of people opposed strong enforcement of the law. Rather than mere possession or consumption of booze, then, what really raised the ire of the community was behavior that threatened others.
Take, for example, the drunken joyride. An infamous case from 1926 drew media attention to the pervasiveness of driving while intoxicated. This was not a problem isolated to Northumberland County, of course, but the issue received much more coverage there than in Snyder or Union Counties. This was related to the greater auto traffic on that side of the river, with a larger population and more registered cars moving over more paved roads. Law enforcement—and the public at large—generally found out about drunk driving when accidents occurred.
Around 2:00 in the morning of Sunday, November 30, 1916, two vehicles collided on the east side of of the Susquehanna River bridge at Lewisburg. Sanford Burrows, Florence Frederick, Harry Frantz, Charles Kitchen, Boyd Newton, and Joseph Rearick were crammed into a coupe designed for only two passengers. They crashed into a Ford roadster that had been converted into a small truck carrying bales of hay. Twenty-two-year-old Burrows was behind the wheel, and he’d been zig-zagging his way south along the river. The driver of the makeshift truck tried, but failed, to avoid the packed car. Five men, ranging in age from 17 to 24, and an 18-year-old woman, piled on top of each other in a car that had been careening through the winter night. As Burrows laid unconscious in a hospital bed for the next two weeks, news accounts of the crash hinted that he had been drunk.
When Burrows awoke, he was arrested for drunk driving. At a preliminary hearing just before Christmas, Florence Frederick stated that the group had just left a party and was playfully trying to evade a second car filled with their friends. Burrows turned out the lights and shot through the November night. The driver of the truck had never seen them coming, and he turned into their path at the bridge. Burrows was bailed out, and in the four months leading up to his trial, his health deteriorated. In May 1927, he agreed to plead guilt in exchange for a fine. He was “half-blind and a physical wreck,” according to the Mount Carmel Item. The judge and the newspaper editor agreed that Burrows’ injuries were adequate punishment for his recklessness.
Driving after drinking was a public threat, certainly, but authorities in Northumberland County were more interested in the depth of the bootlegging problem on their turf. As the Mount Carmel Item put it in the winter of 1926, bootlegging interests from the Shenandoah, Hazleton, and Wilkes-Barre areas were “holding Northumberland County as a battlefield.” As early as 1921, local newspapers reported that local “word on the street” held that booze was flowing in from the east. This was a version of the Mifflin County faith that western Snyder County was the source of so much trouble. Like that case, there was evidence to support the finger-pointing. In December 1921, when three Shenandoah-area men were caught in a car full of 60 gallons of whiskey, Northumberland county authorities stated that it was a drop in a very large bucket.
Several high-profile busts of cars and trucks bringing illicit booze into the county from the northeast alerted officials to the links between Sunbury, Shamokin, Mount Carmel, and outside territory. Yet, try as they might, the local police and the district attorney could not get an indictment for violations of the Volstead Act. The Shamokin Dispatch couldn’t decide who was more brazen—the delivery drivers who roared in from Luzerne County, the hotel keepers who served alcohol with only a thin veil of secrecy, or the grand jury members who threw out even those cases that featured glaring evidence of law-breaking. “Grand jury after grand jury has whitewashed the defendants in liquor cases, no matter how flagrant the violations,” noted the Dispatcheditors.
But that changed, temporarily, in February 1926, when a grand jury in Sunbury indicted eight individuals and companies charged with possession, sales, and transportation. “The indictments came as such a surprise, so as to almost cause legal heart failure, in view of past actions,” noted the Dispatch, “Something must have happened somewhere to get these results.” Whatever it was, it didn’t last. Throughout the rest of the Prohibition period, grand juries in Northumberland County rarely agreed to bring to court those who had been arraigned on dry law charges.
Police in Sunbury, Shamokin, and Mount Carmel soon came to know the methods used by rum-runners to protect themselves from run-ins with the law. The most frequent method was the semi-visible convoy. A truck laden with illicit booze would leave Luzerne or Schuykill County and head west. In front and behind the truck, sometimes spaced out between unrelated cars, were roadsters or touring cars filled with the true owners of the alcohol and men to assist in a getaway if things went wrong. By the mid-1920s, furthermore, a second or third truck might also be part of the convoy, to act as decoys or to assist in hauling the booze if the “work” truck broke down. This system operated by day and by night, with drivers mixing up their schedules and routes to thwart busts.
This kind of setup made law enforcement difficult, to say the least. Stopping a truck and seizing the liquor might stop that evening’s shipment. but it couldn’t definitively identify the people calling the shots.