Bangor couldn’t stop flow of liquor

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Penobscot County’s “campaign for purity” had been going on for six long months when a squad of Bangor cops raided The Mexican Chile the afternoon of June 8, 1905. It was only 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, but things were already jumping at the Broad Street bar in the heart of the Queen City’s saloon district.

The latest effort by local Republicans to enforce state prohibition a century ago seemed an exercise in futility if the Chile was any indicator. Twenty-two customers, including six young women “with beautiful golden hair – black at the roots” – were arrested. So was the owner, James Cyr, who, it was alleged, traveled from city to city setting up similar “resorts.”

With a huge palm tree gracing the center of the barroom and lots of locked rooms upstairs for extracurricular activity, the Chile was a sophisticated operation that would have been known as “a cheap palm garden” or “a low beer or smoking parlor” had it been located in a big city. In the Queen City, it was simply tagged “Bangor’s most vicious den of iniquity” and “the wickedest resort east of Boston” by the Bangor Daily News.

The squad of cops hid in the shadows while Patrolman Clark in plain clothes talked his way into the building. An “ingenious mechanical contrivance” behind the bar enabled the barkeep to lock and unlock the front door at will. The dousing of the Chile was proof that despite all the tough talk about liquor enforcement during the past six months, “no deaths from raging thirsts” had occurred, wrote a wise-guy reporter.

The Chile raid was one of hundreds by local officials all over Maine seeking to neutralize the Sturgis Commission, the new Republican-inspired law body that would be up and running soon with authority to enter a town uninvited and enforce prohibition if the locals fell down on the job. Gov. William J. Cobb had signed the bill late in March and appointed the three commissioners early in April. The draconian measure had been instituted because many local officials, including many Republicans, supported prohibition in name only.

The surge in raids in Bangor and other parts of Penobscot County had started in January after a new, ambitious county attorney declared there were 250 liquor dealers in Bangor, and he was going to send them all to jail. One of the joints to bite the dust first was The Busy Bee, whose “gorgeous ultramarine blue front” faced Haymarket Square, a short distance down Broad Street from The Mexican Chile.

The police were thorough. Besides taking Alexander MacDonald’s liquor supply, they disassembled the bar, removed the mirrors from the walls, ripped up the velvet carpets and even carried off busts of Shakespeare and Dante. A delighted reporter waxed poetic:

“How did the little Busy Bee

Improve each shining minute

By dishing out the eau de gee

For what there might be in it;

To sidestep Sturgis and the cops

It was the Bee’s delight –

To busy be while other shops

Were dark and closed up tight …”

As the liquor crusade continued, Boston suppliers complained they couldn’t collect an estimated $500,000 in debts owed by Maine dealers. And hotel owners groused they would have to raise their rates if they couldn’t sell liquor to their customers.

“People come here from all over the world, and many of them call for liquor on the table, in their rooms or at the bar,” said Capt. Horace C. Chapman, proprietor of the Bangor House, the Queen City’s leading hotel. If they don’t get served in the hotel, “they send out or go out and buy it somewhere in Bangor – and they apparently have no difficulty in getting what they want.”

As the days went by, zealous law enforcement officers even raided express offices in search of mail-order booze. The results were sometimes surprising. “Here are highly respectable men who have preached temperance all their lives and who have condemned the use of liquor in any form, hauled to court and compelled to testify that the contents of the bottles addressed to them were for their own personal use,” said a BDN editorial.

Even druggists and other people handling liquor-laced patent medicines were at risk, including 19 indicted in Biddeford in one swoop. But the strangest event occurred on April 5, when the Knox County Sheriff’s Department raided the City of Rockland’s liquor agency, where booze could be bought legally with a doctor’s prescription, and seized the entire stock. Then the sheriff and his four deputies seized large amounts of patent medicine containing alcohol from two wholesale houses, one of which, Cobb, Wight & Co., belonged to Gov. Cobb.

But were all the raids accomplishing much? The BDN, a Republican newspaper that supported the Sturgis Commission, was growing increasingly skeptical.

On April 4, three months after the round of raids began, a BDN reporter estimated there were still 40 to 60 places to buy liquor in Bangor. They included “back-door businesses” and “kitchen barrooms” run by women. “Pocket peddlers” cruised the streets taking orders. The “pitcher plan” was also popular again. Bartenders kept the goods in glass pitchers they could smash in the sink and wash down the drain in a hurry if they were raided.

A few days later, the police made one of the biggest raids in the city’s history, confiscating $2,500 worth of liquor – 111 bottles and six barrels of whiskey and 935 bottles of beer — in a stable on Adams Street, allegedly intended for the Globe Hotel.

Surprised by all the drunks in court one morning, a reporter asked a police officer how the liquor campaign was going. “Well, it’s very simple,” said the cop. “All the cheap places in town are selling and making big money and all the ‘good’ places are closed up. Down in the [Devil’s Half] acre and along Broad Street and even on the other side [of Kenduskeag Stream] at the foot of Exchange Street and through the district of lumbermen’s boarding houses the bars are running full blast.”

A week before the raid on The Mexican Chile, a BDN editorial questioned whether the members of the Sturgis Commission were doing anything to justify their annual $1,500 salaries. “Just now there are coming to us from all parts of the state many loud complaints about the utter inefficiency of the Sturgis Commission,” said the writer.

All he had to do was wait for the other shoe to drop. On June 26, the paper announced on page one that three Sturgis deputies had started conducting raids in Lewiston, the city long rumored to be the commission’s first target.

Two days later, one of the commissioners, Alfred H. Lang, former sheriff of Somerset County, paid a visit to Bangor. After talking to the sheriff and the police, he took a walk through the saloon district – down Exchange Street, across the draw bridge, up Broad Street and through Pickering Square.

“He didn’t appear to be taking any special interest in the places which might have been doing business along the route but it is safe to wager that he had his eyes open. The lookouts posted at some of the places did not recognize him – if they had there’d been some bad cases of hysteria and heart disease,” wrote a BDN reporter. He predicted “sweeping indictments” would soon be issued in an effort to ward off the Sturgis sting that everyone knew was coming.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.