A century ago, police declared ‘war on dives’

‘WAR ON DIVES SAYS CHIEF BOWEN – Vicious Resorts Will Have to Go – First Raids Made Saturday Night.” So declared the Bangor Daily News in a headline on April 29, 1907, a century ago. Readers doubtlessly yawned or chuckled. How many times had someone declared war on the “dives” since the Maine law was passed nearly 60 years earlier?

In the first decade of the 20th century, Bangor’s saloons and red-light establishments were notorious – law or no law. The new police chief, John C. Bowen, claimed to be “prepared to wage vigorous war upon the notorious dives which have infested the city for the past two years – low saloons where are sold the most poisonous and deadly of liquors, where vice of all kinds flourishes unrestrained.”

There was great irony here. Just a little over two years earlier Penobscot County Attorney Hervey H. Patten had declared he was going to shut down ALL the bars, not just the “low dives.”

The motive for both of these campaigns was the state’s two-year-old Sturgis Commission, which was empowered to send deputies into any county to enforce prohibition if it found evidence locals weren’t doing the job. Gov. William Cobb vetoed an attempt to repeal the commission at the end of March, even though it was dividing Republicans and giving Democrats plenty of campaign fodder. The last thing Bangor officialdom wanted was to be shoved aside by Sturgis agents and lose control over liquor revenues.

Bowen, a former deputy sheriff who had headed the county’s liquor squad, dropped plenty of hints he planned to be tough on the saloons. Soon after he assumed office, most of Bangor’s saloons suddenly changed their hours.

They closed Sundays and stopped operating after 10 p.m. weekdays, the Bangor Daily News reported on April 8. Chief Bowen denied sending out a directive to the saloonkeepers. A frustrated BDN reporter attributed the change to “mental telepathy.”

Later that month, the new chief declared war, but just on “low dives” and “vicious resorts.” First he and Capt. Perkins raided Jennie Knott’s house on Washington Street near the Bangor-Brewer Bridge. They got nothing but a glimpse of a man escaping by the back door. Next they went to the Fiske Building at Harlow and Spring streets and confiscated a half-barrel of ale at William Donnelly’s.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, deputies from the Sheriff’s Department were conducting their own raids, seizing liquor at Aldophus Lamore’s on Union Street, in the alley behind Pickering Square, at the Commercial Club on Main Street, and at Cornelius McAuley’s at 68 Harlow.

The saloonkeepers’ sentinel system was quickly activated. “When it became known that both police and deputy sheriffs were on a hunt for intoxicants, a considerable flurry was caused in those places where one’s thirst may be quenched, and the wireless squad immediately reported for duty,” wrote the BDN reporter. “All corners were decorated with an outpost and an observer could easily see that something was doing.”

The Bangor Daily Commercial, the town’s other major newspaper, noted the raids were unusual because the police had left liquor enforcement up to the Sheriff’s Department for the past two years. Bowen denied he was mounting an all-out campaign to stop the liquor trade. He said he was targeting only “disorderly houses, gambling rooms, the cheap dives in the lower part of the town from which came regularly complaints of drunken brawls and thefts, kitchen barrooms and places of such a nature as to be injurious to the moral health of the city.” In other words, the gentlemen at the Tarratine Club had nothing to worry about.

Press reports of liquor raids, however, subsided as the weeks went by. Was Chief Bowen’s campaign mainly window dressing? It appeared that way. Gov. Cobb was planning to launch a Sturgis invasion into Bangor soon, reported the Bangor Daily News on June 11. “LIQUOR RAIDERS WILL SOON ATTACK BANGOR,” said the headline. After suspending the Sturgis deputies for a few months to give local law officers the benefit of the doubt, Cobb had reactivated them, beginning with raids in Somerset County. Bangor and Lewiston would be next, predicted the newspapers.

When asked what he thought about these reports, Sheriff Gilman said rather forlornly, “But what’s the use? You know as well as I do how much of a job it would be to completely stop liquor selling in Bangor. [It] would take a regular army, wouldn’t it?”

So why try at all? “Never in the history of the city has there been a time when liquor was more plentiful in Bangor than now. … A good many bars are open … so-called clubs flourish all over town, scores of kitchen bars are doing business seven days and nights in the week,” the BDN reported.

Bangoreans had even discovered a new way to evade the prohibition law. They were forming bogus mail express companies. Liquor in transit was not subject to seizure, according to a court ruling. A man could walk into one of these companies and buy liquor on the spot that allegedly had been ordered for someone else. Booze was always on hand for such emergency purchases. “The ‘express company’ is the greatest joke ever perpetrated on the Maine liquor law,” said the Bangor Daily News. But the law itself already seemed like the biggest joke to many Mainers.

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