Wayne Bidwell Wheeler

• Wayne Bidwell Wheeler
• Born: November 10, 1869
• Died: September 5, 1927

Prohibitionist, was born on a farm near Brookfield, Ohio, the second youngest of four children, and only son, of Joseph Wheeler and Ursula (Hutchinson) Wheeler. Both parents came from old New England stock; Joseph Wheeler was a stock buyer who dealt mainly in cattle and sheep.

When he was thirteen, Wayne Wheeler left the local county school for high school at Sharon, Pennsylvania. After graduation he decided to attend Oberlin College, and he earned the money for the first year’s tuition by teaching elementary school in Brookfield (1885-86). He worked his way through college and, without sacrificing his academic record, also participated fully in campus activities, becoming a mainstay of the debating society. He developed several successful small business ventures, and it seemed that he was destined for a business career after his graduation in 1894.

But Wheeler was raised in Ohio, one of the centers of the temperance movement, especially since the Women’s Crusade of 1873-74, which had led to the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Moreover, as a young boy he had, on several occasions, been frightened by intoxicated men, and these experiences gradually hardened into a conviction that liquor was a social evil. His first public commitment to prohibition occurred during his days at Oberlin, which he described as a “hotbed of temperance people.” In 1893 the Rev. Howard Hyde Russell, founder of the newly organized Anti-Saloon League of Ohio, spoke at a public meeting he had organized at the college. In the audience was Wheeler, who listened with such obvious interest that the orator gradually began to direct his remarks toward the young man. When the call was made for pledges against drink, Wheeler signed.

Soon he began to travel through the state, speaking in behalf of the league. Upon joining the league staff in 1894 as the manager for the Dayton district, he helped engineer a victory for a political candidate who was favorable to prohibition. His political skill was evident again when he helped to defeat a candidate supported by Mark Hanna, the powerful Republican party leader. Wheeler continued his work with the league while studying law at Western Reserve University. Upon graduating in 1898, he was appointed attorney for the league, in charge of litigation and legislation. In 1903, he became superintendent for Ohio.

Wheeler’s tactics in dealing with “wet” (anti-prohibition) politicians were unorthodox but effective. Instead of attacking all who were not totally “dry,” he concentrated on those who were the most staunchly wet and tried to show that they could be beaten at the polls. Often they were, and they became object lessons for the moderate wets, whom Wheeler encouraged to become drys.

By maintaining friendly relations with both drys and moderate wets, he acquired considerable political influence. In 1904 he helped to win a victory over Republican wets with the defeat of Gov. Myron T. Herrick. By 1905, sixty percent of Ohioans were dry by local option, as various towns voted to ban liquor sales in their jurisdictions, and it seemed possible to extend local-option restriction to the rest of the state.

Local success brought national attention. Wheeler was given the additional office of attorney for the national league and became a member of a committee to support passage of a national prohibition amendment (1913).

Wheeler traveled throughout Ohio to drum up support for prohibition. Most of his backing was in the countryside, which he believed was the site of traditional American virtues: “God made the country, but men made the town.” In 1915 he had to relinquish his control over Ohio to give his full attention to the national struggle. Taking up residence in Washington, D.C., he argued cases before the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, advised congressmen on legislation, and exerted his political influence wherever possible to further prohibition.

He quickly became the league’s national spokesman, a tireless worker who spoke before innumerable organizations around the country and wrote hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines. He was among those who persuaded Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to order a ban on liquor on ships and bases, (1914), and he was also active in lobbying for the various wartime congressional acts prohibiting liquor in the army. Although he had little to do with the actual ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) he claimed virtually to have written the enabling bill that came to be known as the Volstead Act. At the very least, it is true that he participated in writing it and was asked to explain its provisions to many members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was, in fact, charged by opponents with drafting such complex measures that he increased his own power as the only man who could understand and interpret the code of enforcement.

The combination of his association with the Volstead Act and his growing political connections made Wheeler one of the most influential private citizens in the country. His role also expanded in the league, which seldom interfered with his activities. The election of Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding as president in 1920 solidified his position, since Harding, although well-known for his enjoyment of whiskey, had voted for prohibition.

Wheeler’s prominence both in politics and in the public eye enabled him to publish articles about prohibition in many of the most important magazines. (He boasted that he had never received a rejection slip.) He was even asked to speak to students in a course on practical politics at Columbia University in 1923, choosing pressure groups as his topic. Such groups, he argued, provide a means by which the people make their preferences felt in the political process: “Humanitarian and moral problems may be solved through pressure group methods apart from political partisanship,” enabling “members of conflicting political creeds to meet on common ground.” The possibility that pressure groups might subvert the political process was greatly lessened, he thought, by recent federal laws on corrupt practices. In any case, publicly visible pressure groups were less dangerous than secret lobbies.

Unlike many prohibitionists, Wheeler understood that prohibition was useless without strict enforcement, and he therefore used his influence to help select federal judges, attorneys, and administrators who were drys. Enforcement was difficult, however, if the chief executive himself was a lawbreaker; consequently, in 1923, Wheeler met privately with President Harding and persuaded him, much against the latter’s tastes, to make a public pledge of abstinence and set an example for the country. But Wheeler’s greatest triumph occurred the next year, at the Democratic National Convention. He wanted to prevent a wet from getting the nomination. (Of the two favored candidates, Alfred E. Smith was considered a wet and W. G. McAdoo a dry.) Wheeler used some delegates he controlled to help create a deadlock that forced the nomination of a weak compromise candidate, John W. Davis. Since the likely Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge, was a dry, both prohibition and Wayne Wheeler’s influence in the White House would be preserved.

Meanwhile, unrest grew in the league about his “opportunism”; he seemed too closely tied to the fortunes of a few Republican politicians and officeholders. In a speech before the league convention in 1925, the governor of Pennsylvania criticized the federal enforcement of prohibition, contrasting it with the effective efforts in his state. By chiding the administration, he was also condemning its prohibition adviser.

Only by dint of his persuasive abilities did Wheeler restore his influence in the league. But he was now showing the strain of thirty years of unrelenting work. He felt so personally responsible for the enforcement of prohibition that he could not refuse any offer to speak or write in its behalf. Though weakened and ill, he relished the thought of crossing swords with one of his political opponents, James Reed, a wet senator from Missouri. As chair of the Judiciary Committee, Reed had opened an investigation of spending in a recent senatorial campaign that was ostensibly aimed at all contributors but in fact concentrated on the league. Reed leveled charges of illegal contributions and other improprieties; these were disproved by later testimony but the drys were on the run. Ominously, Wheeler received no help even from those committee members who owed him political favors.

The hearings exhausted him, and he retired in 1927 to a summer house in Michigan to regain his strength. There he was joined by his wife, Ella Belle Candy Wheeler, the daughter of a Columbus, Ohio, merchant, whom he had married in 1901. Then tragedy struck. His wife died from burns sustained in a kitchen fire; a few weeks later Wheeler himself died, at fifty-seven, of exhaustion and kidney disease. He was survived by three sons.

Wheeler left a mixed legacy. His energy, intelligence, and political expertise helped make the Anti-Saloon League the first successful public-interest pressure group and contributed greatly to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and the passage of the Volstead Act. After these initial successes he labored tirelessly for meaningful enforcement, using all the political influence he had accumulated during the previous twenty years. But his caustic and unforgiving personality made him many enemies, even among supporters of prohibition. His brand of political manipulation, popularly dubbed “Wheelerism,” and his evident love of wielding power, offended reformers and excited the jealousy and fear of politicians.

Aside from numerous articles about prohibition for magazines and newspapers, Wayne Wheeler published a compilation entitled The Federal and State Laws Relating to the Liquor Traffic (1916). The biography by J. Steuart, Wayne Wheeler, Dry Boss (1928), may be supplemented with P. H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (1928); and A. Sinclair, The Roots of Prohibition (1956). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, September 6, 1927.