portraiture of white women. “I bought, for evidence, many other brands, some emanating from the big liquor cities and some put up by local people; but I could always get Levy’s. I never saw it in any saloon which bars the Negro.
“In Galveston, which prides itself on its clean government, some brand or other was for sale in nearly all the corner grocery ‘drums.’
“In a Negro street of New Orleans I saw five saloon shop windows in one block which displayed either Lee Levy’s or Dreyfuss, Weil & Company’s. This latter firm is more clever in its work than the others, much more delicate and subtle in its labeling policy. It takes one who understands the Negro and his slang to appreciate the enigma of their wording; it all comes in a ‘caution label’ on the obverse of the bottles.
“....Such gins were sold everywhere in Birmingham ... a bottle of the stuff, half empty, had been taken from a Pickens County Negro just after his arrest for the nameless crime.
“Levy—so the gossip of the liquor trade has it—grew rich through this department of his business. Dreyfuss, Weil & Company advertise everywhere that theirs is ‘the most widely sold brand in the South.’ And more and more one hears of tragedies that lie at the end of this course.”
That is a sample—an expurgated sample—of what went on in every part of the country. Newspaper reporters will remember how the police used to wonder about the change that came over certain foreign communities. “They come here nice people,” the experienced police captain would say, “but in a short time they are giving us all sorts of trouble. They don’t do that in their own country.”
“It’s the drink,” somebody would suggest.
“No, they drink in their own country, they drink all the time there. It’s the kind of drink they get here that does it—the ‘rot-gut,’ that drives