NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Her enemies called her “Prohibition Portia” and “Deborah of the Drys.” Her admirers called her the “First Lady of Law.” And in 1928, all but her closest friends called Mabel Walker Willebrandt “anti-Catholic.” The accusations came in the wake of Willebrandt’s vigorous campaigning against the Catholic Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith.
For eight years, beginning with her September 27, 1921, appointment as assistant attorney general, Willebrandt led the federal enforcement of prohibition. At the time of her appointment, she was only 32 years old and neither a teetotaler nor a fan of prohibition. But Willebrandt believed the law was the law and understood that accepting the appointment meant agreeing to enforce the laws, whether she liked them or not. And enforce them she did.
Describing her job as “attempting to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter,” Willebrandt oversaw more than 50,000 prosecutions of prohibition violators, all while cleaning up massive corruption in federal law enforcement. Ambitious, intelligent, and disciplined, Willebrandt did nothing halfway, which explains why she publicly went on the offensive against Smith, who as governor of New York made no secret of his disdain for prohibition.
In addition to arranging raids in New York perfectly timed to humiliate the governor, Willebrandt also denounced him in Scripture-laced speeches before prohibition’s strongest supporters: Protestants. In one such speech, delivered to a Methodist ministers’ conference, she urged her audience to “Take to your pulpits! Preach the message! Rouse your communities!” Almost everyone in America, Smith included, accused Willebrandt of playing the religion card. She denied it, but to no avail.
After President Herbert Hoover’s victory, Willebrandt expected him to reward her with a promotion. When he didn’t, she left the Department of Justice and returned to private practice. Her first client was California Fruit Industries, which specialized in providing grapes to home winemakers. Willebrandt’s new alliance with the industry she’d worked against shocked America. Her conversion to Catholicism, many years later, shocked the country even more. Willebrandt died of lung cancer in 1963.
