[CORRECTION: On p. 85, second full paragraph, the words in [brackets] should be deleted: "Except for Minton, all of the Senators who voted to acquit Ritter on [one of] the first six articles also voted to acquit him on the seventh article."]
When Maximilian Longley published his last book, *Discordant Sound* (writing as Eric Longley), the literary magazine *Wild Violet* praised the "rigorous research" which he brought to a wide variety of subjects. In *What Measure Ye Mete,* Longley applies the same kind of rigorous research to the life of Halsted Ritter, a lawyer and Prohibition activist who served as a federal judge from 1929 until his impeachment and conviction in 1936.
Ritter was the brother of historian Mary Ritter Beard, as well as being a history-maker in his own right. As a reformist lawyer in Colorado, he campaigned for Prohibition. When he moved to Florida in his later years, he got appointed as a federal trial judge. During the New Deal, when conservative trial judges like him had become unpopular, Ritter found himself on trial in Congress on charges of misconduct in office.
Halsted Ritter seems to meet the stereotype of a hypocritical moralist who is tripped up by the same kind of high standards he tried to enforce on others. Ritter was an activist in the Anti-Saloon League, the organization that helped impose Prohibition on the United States. He was appointed to a federal judgeship in Florida during Prohibition, partly because of his record of support for that policy. He was later impeached and removed from office because of alleged improprieties committed while on the bench.
The story is more complicated than that. While Ritter’s conduct as a judge had some dubious elements, his conviction took place in ambiguous circumstances which cast doubt on what exactly it was that he was supposed to have done wrong. Some have even speculated that it was Ritter’s conservative political and judicial philosophy, not his alleged crimes, that provided the true impetus behind his downfall. Be that as it may, Ritter was a fascinating individual whose life story deserves retelling, in part because of his involvement with some of the central events of his time: Prohibition, the Depression, and judicial politics.
Excerpt
Here is an excerpt from the book, describing one of Ritter's first cases as a federal judge (pp. 41-46):
Ritter scarcely had time to settle in to his duties when it fell to him to preside over the concluding stages of a dramatic case, what one author called “one of the most sensational cases of the entire prohibition decade.” The case involved the “Gulf Stream Pirate,” James Horace Alderman. The prosecutor said that the case “beats any dime novel in color and brazen defiance of the law.”
. . . Florida was a major point of entry for rumrunners whose illegally imported beverages slaked the thirst of people throughout the United States. Smugglers would load up on booze in the British Bahamas or other Caribbean islands, then bring their goods into the United States through Florida. Of particular importance was the Bahamian island of Bimini, which was just fifty miles off of Florida. Nassau liquor merchants would send supplies of alcohol to Bimini, and American rumrunners would come in on their boats and place their orders. With their alcoholic cargoes, the rumrunners would then attempt to slip back into Florida.
The U. S. Coast Guard had the task of stopping them. At first, the relations between the Coast Guard and the smugglers were comparatively easygoing. A manufacturer of rumrunning boats later claimed that, if a rumrunning vessel was captured by the Coast Guard, the manufacturer would often buy it back at a government seizure auction, and the vessel would soon be back to smuggling. However, the Coast Guard began hardening its attitude as its struggle with the smugglers went on. Captured rumrunning boats now were burned, or added to the Coast Guard’s fleet, rather than auctioned off, and the Coast Guard adopted a grimmer attitude toward the smugglers.
Even after the Coast Guard started getting serious about attacking the alcohol trade, it ran into obstacles. These included uncooperative local officials, unenthusiastic federal prosecutors, and congested dockets in the federal courts. One Coast Guardsman discussed the difficulties of Prohibition enforcement: “When caught, smugglers usually grinned ruefully and shrugged. They knew that the syndicates which employed them would soon buy them out, and that with luck they’d be back working at the same old stand.” Author Nixon Smiley says: “At the height of the liquor running an estimated ten million gallons of alcohol was being transported each year from West End, Grand Bahama, and Bimini to the mainland.”
Also impeding the Coast Guard’s enforcement efforts was what can euphemistically be described as a lack of public support. As a former Coast Guard officer later reflected: “We were on trial rather than the rumrunners.” At one point, Coast Guardsmen were literally put on trial: Coast Guardsmen were indicted on second-degree murder charges (although later acquitted) for killing a rumrunner and two of his associates in Biscayne Bay. In another incident, the Coast Guard pursued and shot at a smuggling craft within sight of Miamians, but the rumrunner escaped, and the watching crown jeered the Coast Guard while cheering the smuggler.
Many Floridians, then, doubtless shared Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken’s favorable view of the rumrunner:
"He is the true heir, not only of the old-time Indian fighters and train-robbers, but also of the tough and barnacled deep-water sailors, now no more. He faces the perils of the high seas in a puny shallop, and navigates the worst coast of the world in contempt of wind and storm. . . .
"This brave lad is not only the heir of Jesse James and Ned Buntline; he is also the heir of John Hancock and of all the other heroes who throttled the accursed Hun in 1776 . . . . Liberty, driven from the land by the Methodist White Terror, has been given a refuge by the hardy boys of the Rum Fleet. In their bleak and lonely exile they cherish her and keep her alive. Some day, let us hope, they will storm the coast, slit the gullets of her enemies, and restore her to her dominion."
Mencken’s hyperbolic words were not the only hint that the smugglers might be violent. The Miami Herald of August 5, 1927 printed a warning from a Coast Guard official: “The rum runners are organized. They have a fund to provide for the defense of any of their men who are captured. And they have placed a price on the heads of any of our most active coast guardsmen.”
Two days after these words of warning were printed, on August 7, 1927, a Coast Guard patrol boat left Fort Lauderdale and headed toward Bimini. Boatswain Sidney C. Sanderlin was the commander of the patrol boat and of six crew members. The patrol boat, CG 249, was not looking for rumrunners; it was carrying a passenger. Secret Service agent Robert Webster was going to Bimini to talk to potential witnesses in a counterfeiting investigation.
At about half past 1:00 PM, when CG 249 was approximately seventeen miles from Bimini and around thirty-eight miles from Fort Lauderdale, the crew spotted a motorboat, a thirty-foot schooner, headed for Miami. Suspecting that the motorboat was smuggling rum, the crew of CG 249 sounded a signal and fired two blank shots, in an effort to stop the motorboat. When it didn’t stop, CG 249 fired a shot across her bow. This time, the motorboat stopped. With the assistance of two other Coast Guardsmen, Sanderlin seized twenty cases of liquor from the motorboat and brought the motorboat’s captain, an ex-convict named James Horace Alderman, aboard the Coast Guard cutter. Alderman’s henchman, a man named Robert Weech, was either brought on board the cutter with Alderman or else left on the motorboat (accounts vary).
In Alderman’s subsequent trial, the prosecution gave the following version of what happened next: Sanderlin went into the pilothouse on the patrol boat, intending to contact the Coast Guard’s Fort Lauderdale base for instructions. Should Sanderlin finish his mission to bring Webster to Bimini, or should he abort the mission and bring Alderman, Weech and the motorboat back to Florida? Before Sanderlin could get in touch with Coast Guard headquarters, Alderman shot and killed him. How Alderman got the gun is unclear . Alderman also shot motor machinist’s mate Victor Lamby. Seriously wounded, Lamby dragged himself into the engine room of the patrol boat.
Alderman was now armed with two guns: the gun that killed Sanderlin and wounded Lamby, and a gun that used to belong to Sanderlin. Alderman made prisoners of Secret Service agent Webster and of the remaining Coast Guardsmen, except Lamby, who remained in the engine room of the cutter. Alderman assembled his prisoners on his motorboat.
At this point, according to the prosecution in Alderman’s later trial, Alderman planned to flood the bilges of the CG 249 with gasoline, burn the cutter, and make the prisoners walk the plank. . . .
Yar har har, my hearties! That's the end of the excerpt.
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