Prohibition

Review: The Rossi Murder and the Unwritten Law in 1916’s Wallace, Idaho

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is by Katherine Aiken, a professor emerita of history at the University of Idaho with an emphasis in social and cultural history, women, and labor. She is the author of Idaho’s Bunker Hill: The Rise and Fall of a Great Mining Company, 1885-1981

The combination of a salacious adultery story; a murder in front of eyewitnesses; and a circus-like trial is a recipe for an exciting tale. This is indeed true of the 1916 Rossi murder that is the subject of Ron Roizen’s book, The Rossi Murder: And the Unwritten Law in 1916’s Wallace, Idaho (2021). Herman J. Rossi was a Wallace, Idaho, community leader, serving at various times as the mayor of Wallace and as a member of the Idaho legislature.

In 1906, he married Mabel Rice, fifteen years his junior. Rossi soon discovered that, instead of the ingenue he expected, Mabel, in fact, struggled with an alcohol addiction. Although Rossi apparently doted on his young wife, prominent Wallace women declined to associate with Mabel due to her alleged drinking. Rossi believed that alcoholism was a disease, and he sought treatment for his wife on several occasions—but never found a permanent cure.

In late June 1916, Rossi returned from a political trip to the state capitol to find his wife had spent three days—much of it in bed—with a local musician and alleged bootlegger, Clarence Dahlquist. Rossi pulled his wife from her bed; slapped her; tore off her nightgown and threatened to throw her naked into the street. Next, he went to the kitchen and drank two cups of black coffee and then walked down the street to the Samuels Hotel lobby where he confronted Dahlquist and shot him. Dahlquist died the next morning.

Aiken Review Rossi Murder Title Card

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Profiting for Prescription: Medicinal Alcohol During Prohibition

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Brooks Hudson, a PhD student in history at Southern Illinois University.

James E. Pepper Whiskey Ad
James E. Pepper Whisky ad from the late nineteenth century. Source: James E. Pepper Distilling Company.

Whenever Prohibition reenters the zeitgeist through pop culture like the recent cable TV series Boardwalk Empire or through a historical anniversary, it seems inevitable that someone will produce an “isn’t this ridiculous” style article about the “bizarre” practice of prescribing medicinal alcohol. On the surface, the entire debate about prescription alcohol often seems illegitimate and merely a loophole that doctors and patients used to skirt enforcement of the Volstead Act.

As medical historians have pointed out, though, prescription alcohol is not merely arcane trivia.  It represented an early skirmish between an aggressive government and the collective efforts of the American Medical Association to assert its rights to distance medicine from politics.  

In reality, the status of medicinal alcohol resulted from negotiations between the state and organized medicine over the power to prescribe. Medicine already had enough prestige to weaponize laws against rival professions. Even critics of the AMA like pharmacist Henry Rowland Strong understood that it was seen “as a graceless and indelicate thing to criticize the medical profession,” and, he argued, the “political schemers in the high places of organized medicine” were always “quick to take advantage of this sentiment.” Strong feared that medicine would overtake pharmacy, and he warned:

“No sooner is [the doctor] attacked for his greed for power and his unscrupulous methods of attaining it than he hastens to hide behind the skirts of the profession at large—the sentimental and picturesque ideal of the profession that the public cherishes in its heart—waxing eloquent about the sacredness of the calling, reciting its long list of honorable men and achievements, and setting forth its noble and disinterested aims.”

Critics feared that giving organized medicine the power to decide what medicines people could use would, in the words of Strong, “be tantamount to the establishment of a State system of medicine.”

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Crime and Punishment, But No Victims: The Mob Museum of Las Vegas

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia. In it, she continues her series of museum reviews with a visit to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. Photos by Dr. Kadia. 

Although most tourists probably don’t associate Las Vegas with museums, the city is in fact home to some noteworthy institutions. One interesting example is the Mob Museum, located downtown in a former courthouse. At $26.95 for out-of-state adult admission ($16.95 for Nevada residents with ID) entry is not cheap, but perhaps a bargain compared with the casinos up the street. One might easily spend as much as three hours perusing the three stories of exhibits and basement reconstructions of a speakeasy and distillery.

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The Mob Museum of Las Vegas

The exhibition begins on the third floor with a discussion of the origins of the Mob in the late nineteenth century. Curators narrate: whereas most immigrants to the U.S. were “good,” “a few thought they would choose a shortcut to the American dream.” Evoking Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign comments about “bad hombres,” the museum’s casual scapegoating of Irish, Italian, and Jewish foreigners for mobsterism feels not only misleading but dangerous.

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Towards a Global History of Intoxicants: The War on Alcohol

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Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from contributing editor Dr. Miriam Kingsberg Kadia , professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In it, she brings a global focus to drug and alcohol history and reviews Lisa McGirr’s book on federal Prohibition. Enjoy!

Screenshot 2018-10-18 at 8.23.09 AMLisa McGirr’s stimulating recent book The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (Norton, 2016) links early twentieth-century temperance to the origins of the muscular federal authority we know today. Historians typically trace the enlargement of state power to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to lift the United States out of the Depression in the 1930s. However, McGirr points to earlier growth in the Prohibition era. By creating new categories of legal violations, the ban on brewing and selling alcohol transformed crime into a “national obsession” for the first time in American history. The government responded to public panic by expanding law enforcement—a measure whose effects linger today in such forms as the War on Drugs.

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Video: Emily Dufton at Cannabis: Global Histories

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When historians gathered at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, in April of this year for the Cannabis: Global Histories conference, we were fortunate to have Morgan Scott of Breathe Image there to document the event. Morgan also took short videos of all the presenters, in which we discussed our work and the conference itself. We’re excited …

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The Points Interview: Michael Lewis

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Editor’s Note: Today’s interview is with Dr. Michael Lewis, author of the new book, The Coming of Southern Prohibition (out now from LSU Press). He is an assistant professor of sociology at Christopher Newport University. Contact Dr. Lewis at mlewis@cnu.edu. 

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Describe your book in terms your bartender could understand.

The Coming of Southern Prohibition is a story about profit from liquor sales- who gets it and how the government sometimes uses morality and fear to make rules to ensure they get more of it. In 1892 South Carolina’s Governor Benjamin Tillman did just that, creating a statewide system of liquor stores that kept all the liquor profits for the state and county government. The subsequent decisions that South Carolina counties made about how many liquor stores they should permit and where these ought to be located were influenced as much by the chances of increasing profit than they were by preventing
alcohol sales to the “riff-raff” of society.

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Religion and Anti-Prohibition

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Editor’s Note: This post is brought to you by Brendan Payne, a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at Baylor University finishing his dissertation, “Cup of Salvation: Race, Religion, and (Anti-)Prohibition in Texas, 1885-1935.” Enjoy!

Jews and BoozeWhen I tell people that my dissertation addresses religion and alcohol prohibition, many recall stories of relatives involved in the noble experiment. Almost invariably, those who make a point of their ancestors’ religiosity recount how they joined the crusade for prohibition, such as a grandmother who led a chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union or a minister who railed against demon rum, while those who mention their grandfather’s bootlegging have little to comment on his piety. The implicit assumption – that religion inspired only prohibition’s backers and not its opponents – may be too blunt for most scholars to state plainly, though this assumption casts a significant shadow over much of prohibition scholarship. Only a few books, such as Marni Davis’s Jews and Booze, deal in-depth with an overwhelmingly wet religious minority, though even that work is more interested in the tremendously important questions of ethnicity and American identity than in religion as such. Too many academic works on prohibition that address religion either focus almost exclusively on drys or oversimplify the connection between faith and prohibition, with (for example) Catholics always being wet and Baptists invariably dry.

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Politics & Poison: Government Sanctioned Murder During Prohibition

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Editor’s Note: This post is brought to you by Liz Greene, a history geek and an anxiety-ridden realist from the beautiful city of trees, Boise, Idaho. You can follow her latest misadventures on her blog, Instant Lo. Enjoy!

When it comes to failed social experiments in U.S. history, Prohibition takes the cake. Far from ushering in the utopian society promised by the temperance movement, Prohibition only succeeded in making matters much worse.

The new law was met with outright rebellion. Bootleggers made a fortune distilling and selling alcohol. Thousands of speakeasies popped up, serving a thirsty population who cared little for the legality of the situation. Organized crime rose to the forefront, distributing booze, warring with rival gangs, and taking out innocent bystanders in the process. Murder became a familiar headline. [1]

But the mob and unskilled bootleggers weren’t the only ones causing death and destruction during Prohibition. The federal government had a large role to play as well.

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