saloons may have been sinkholes but at least you didn’t have to fight your way through crowds of schoolgirls to reach the bar.^[10]

Confronted with the ongoing failure of law enforcement, the prohibitionists demanded more of it—tougher judges, harsher sentences, more draconian punishment.  By 1929 the penalties had been ratcheted up by a factor of ten.  You could now get five years and a $10,000 fine for selling one drink.^[11]  The enforcement budget was tripled, more agents were hired, the Fourth Amendment was practically set aside—and still it came, an unstoppable wellspring of booze flowing from breweries in basements, and breweries that covered acres operating at full tilt with the complete cooperation of local officials, and from three hundred thousand private stills spread all over the country. A man who paddled his canoe the length of the Mississippi in the late 1920s said the scent of fermenting mash was in the wind from the headwaters of Lake Itaska to the dock at New Orleans.^[12]  An updated verse of the old railroad gandy-dancer’s tune said it all:

My sister sells snow to the snowbirds.

My father makes bootlegger gin,

My mother sells wine from the grapes on our vine

My God! How the money rolls in.^[13]

In the end, the rapier-like coup de grace to Prohibition would be administered by a woman.  Tall, statuesque, strikingly beautiful, Pauline Morton Sabin came from the same rarified atmosphere as Henry Joy.  Her uncle was the Morton of “When It Rains, It Pours” and her father was Secretary of the Navy under Teddy Roosevelt.  Like Henry Joy, Pauline Sabin had been an early supporter of Prohibition. “I felt I should approve it because it would help my two sons... I thought a world without liquor would be a beautiful world.”  Now she would undo it with a fatal thrust.

A lifelong Republican and a skilled organizer, Mrs. Sabin watched with growing agony as the violence and corruption