law violations galore, and it was well enough recognized in the rectifying business as a regular practice to appropriate annually a certain sum to pay the fines that were bound to be assessed against it. A riot of adulteration and chicanery ensued, with whisky being made in many saloon cellars and the dangerous secrets of synthetic booze-making being peddled abroad among the customers of the trust.
Presently the saloon men became aware of the fact that they were the goats of the game. Seldom was the Jew engaged in dishing out five-cent beers or ten-cent whiskies; it remained for the “boob Gentile” to do that; the Jew was at the wholesale end where the real profits were made. But it was the saloon man who took the brunt of the blame. The Jewish “distillers,” as the compounders and blenders of the Louisville and Peoria districts were called, wore silk hats and their respectability was unquestioned. The saloon men made an eleventh hour effort to save their business, but the stuff they were pouring out had not improved, and Prohibition came, sweeping the saloon away, but, as the sequel will show, not depriving the Jewish compounder of his profits.
How much of the liquor business of the United States was in whisky and how much in rectified spirits?
The Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, said: “Most of the distilled liquors consumed as a beverage by the American people pass through rectifying houses. The different classes of rectified spirits range from the cheapest concoctions of neutral spirits and drugs to the simple blending of young and old whisky.”
Twenty years ago statistics showed that 80 per cent of the so-called whisky put up in the United States was imitation whisky. Chief Chemist Wiley, whose concern was not with the quantity but with the quality, gave it as his information “that over half the whisky in this country was compounded whisky. Less than half was genuine; and while they usually