Glitz and Gunfire
The Hotel Chase Riot of New Year's Eve, 1922
By Robbi Courtaway
“If the raids that were made upon the hotels on New Year’s eve were started when prohibition first went into effect, I venture to say that prohibition would not have lasted six months, but alas, they saw fit to make the poor the victim and what chance have they?”
—Unidentified St. Louis waiter, 1923
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| Exterior of the Hotel Chase in the Central West End. Photograph by W. C. Persons, 1920s. Missouri History Museum. | |
In elegant sedans they arrived in the waning hours of 1922, dressed in silk and broadcloth and fur-trimmed coats, and entered the gilded halls of Hotel Chase for what would be a truly unforgettable New Year’s Eve.
More than 2,200 of St. Louis’s prominent citizens had purchased tickets at $10 a plate—the equivalent of approximately $120 today—to enjoy the private party at St. Louis’s exclusive West End hotel, built earlier that year at a cost of $5 million. Many revelers also rented rooms at an additional $10 to store their wraps and private liquor stocks. Nationwide Prohibition, enacted three years earlier, forbade the manufacture and sale of liquor but allowed residents to savor their stocks of pre-Prohibition liquor at home.
Their special guest for the evening was the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, one of the most popular musical talents in the nation, who two years later would introduce George Gershwin’s legendary “Rhapsody in Blue” to the world.
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| An undated Victor Records advertisement for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, which played at the Hotel Chase on New Year's Eve of 1922. Courtesy Library of Congress. | ||
Whiteman no doubt was pleased to visit St. Louis, then the seventh-largest city in the nation with 800,000 residents, a solid manufacturing bastion known for its red-brick homes and yellow streetcars. One in every five people in the United States walked through the day in shoes manufactured in the Mound City.
If Gus O. Nations had his way, the land of the brick homes and yellow streetcars would be one with the Sahara Desert. Nations, chief of the city’s Prohibition enforcement agents, had pledged to make New Year’s Eve of 1922 the driest ever in St. Louis. But the well-to-do residents who gathered at the Hotel Chase had no intention of joining the working-class St. Louisans, African Americans, and immigrants who dominated the headlines in liquor arrests up to that time.
The result was a riot: One of the agents shot three patrons, one of whom was dancing with his wife at the time; another was returning from the powder room. The resulting mob injured an agent, sent a hail of silverware, plates, salt and pepper shakers, and entrees flying across the room and, as many continued to dance and dine, drove out the agents in an angry wall 250 people strong as police enforcements gathered outside. The Chase fiasco galvanized wet and dry forces in a contentious battle that would continue for the rest of the decade and into the 1930s, over an unpopular law many felt compelled to break.
The Raid
Shortly after 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, three men entered the Hotel Chase, one of whom announced himself as a Prohibition enforcement agent, hotel proprietor Chase Ulman later told reporters. Ulman replied that the event was open only to guests holding admission tickets and asked if the agent had a search warrant.
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| Chase Ulman, owner of Hotel Chase. Photograph by Edwyn, 1940s. Missouri History Museum. | |
“Here’s my search warrant,” the dry agent replied, and displayed his badge.
Ulman told the agent he would cooperate only if he had a search warrant. The agent ignored the hotel owner and made his way into one of the dining rooms with the other agents, stopping at each table. Eventually, they stopped at a table where two couples were seated and arrested O. L. Dixon, 30, and Richard Warren, 25, after accusing Dixon of pouring a drink of liquor from a flask.
“Why didn’t you leave your liquor at home?” asked one of the agents. “You’re under arrest.”
A reporter from the Post-Dispatch was there:
Like wildfire word of the arrests spread through the dining rooms. Those who had liquor kept it on the hip, abandoning the custom of keeping it on the table under a napkin or tablecloth.... At midnight, to the raucous cheers of more than 2,200 diners, Paul Whiteman’s orchestra ushered in the New Year with the national anthem. Hundreds accompanied by singing, laying particular emphasis on the words, "The land of the free."
At approximately 1:30 a.m., Nations and assistants M. L. Hogg and L. H. Gatter walked in the hotel, this time with a search warrant, and headed to the Palm Room. Nations had summoned city detectives to follow him, including St. Louis Police Detective Sgt. John Glassco, but they participated mainly as spectators, the Post-Dispatch noted.
All the agents were wearing hats and overcoats, and one was smoking a cigar, as they circulated among the tables, tossed napkins about, picked up tablecloths, and sniffed the contents of glasses. The Post described the scene:
“Take off your hat!” “Throw away that cigar!” “Get out of here and stay out!” These suggestions were disregarded by Nations and his two assistants as they progressed in their search. About 10 tables had been searched when a woman screamed and her escort punched an enforcement agent’s face. One version was that the woman had asserted that one of the agents, in lifting a tablecloth to glance under the table, had raised the skirt of her gown.
Almost immediately the dry agents were surrounded by about 200 men and women. Vigorous demands were made by some guests that the dry agents depart at once. The agents stood their ground. Words passed. Blows were struck. Glasses, plates, silverware and water were hurled through the air. The three agents, being the only ones in the demonstrative and surging group who were not in evening dress, were shining targets.
Some women began screaming and rushing for points of safety. Some held their hands over their eyes as their escorts hurriedly led them from the dance floor. All the while the orchestra, under orders from the management, kept playing fast and loudly, in an effort to drown the noise of the excited, fighting, surging crowd 50 feet distant.
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Group of unidentified partygoers during Prohibition. Photograph, ca. 1925. Missouri History Museum. |
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Nations would later tell offcials he spent most of his time “trying to disengage myself from a drunken woman who wanted to dance with me.” The surging mob, which he described as “250 drunken men,” eventually got the better of him and his agents.
An unsuccessful effort was made to push the dry agents from the Palm Room into the lounge room. Then the crowd surged toward the west entrance to the Palm room, the only avenue of entrance and exit during the evening.
Throw them out! the insistent and oft-repeated demand, was being put into execution. The dry agents found themselves helpless in the center of an angry crowd….The orchestra stopped playing. As the belligerents neared the exit, and while still in the Palm Room, a revolver shot was heard.
Bouncing Bullets
A single bullet apparently ricocheted off the tile floor and hit a woman and two men. Jane Robinson, 36, was returning from the dressing room to her table in the west dining room when she felt a sting in her ankle. George A. Bode Jr., 27, son of the marshal of the St. Louis Court of Appeals, was grazed by the bullet in the right foot. And John Pazdera, 28, was wounded in the left leg below the knee while he danced with his wife. Pazdera was vice president of the Consumers Grocery and Meat Co.
St. Louis Police Detective Edward Sullivan had fired the shot. He told investigators he had been struck repeatedly on the head and back by flying objects. Sullivan said he and the other agents were pulled and dragged back and forth by the crowd, many of whom were intoxicated.
“I had gotten toward the front part of the dining room when I was attacked by several men, all of whom were striking me from the rear,” Sullivan observed. “I was finally knocked down and while down three or four men were kicking me in the side and back. Also one man said, ‘Throw pepper in his eyes and blind him.’ I managed to rise from the floor to my knees and seeing them attempt to kick me again I drew my revolver and shot at the man who was kicking me. I later learned that he had been shot in the leg. When I had gained the front door I found that I was bleeding from a badly lacerated lip; also four of my front teeth were loose, and [I was] bruised on the back and sides.”
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| The Palm Room at Hotel Chase in the early 1920s. Courtesy Virginia Publishing Co. and Susan Koplar Brown. | |
Pazdera denied he had kicked the detective. He also denied having any liquor at the hotel and said he was dancing with a woman in his party when the crowd began shoving toward the south wall of the Palm Room. “I saw a lady fall to her knees,” he said. “I went over to help her and lifted her to her feet. As I turned around, an officer smiled at me. I said to him: ‘I don’t think you can do much here,’ and he agreed. The crowd shoved the officers to the entrance. My wife grabbed me and said, ‘Come on.’ I started away. I saw a man put his hand to his hip and fire.”
Harry Meyer, a waiter at the Chase, said the officer was arising from a kneeling position when he drew his revolver from his right-hand hip pocket and fired.
Ulman, who had not seen the search warrant, approached the Prohibition agents with his attorney. After Nations displayed the warrant, Ulman gave him permission to conduct a further search in the hotel.
“I had not quite finished,” Nations replied, “but if I go back I will take more than six men.”
“Take ten men, then,” said Ulman.
“Not on your life,” Nations replied. “I will take the whole squad, including the reserves, or I won’t go.”
Despite all the excitement, the festivities at the Chase continued without interruption until daylight, when “a large proportion” of the 2,600 guests could still be found dancing or sitting around tables, according to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
Nations didn’t return to the hotel that morning, citing public safety concerns. “When they [the mob] began throwing things and pressing toward us, I saw that, should we avail ourselves of all means of resistance we could have rightly used, many innocent people would have been hurt or killed,” he later told a reporter. “So I told the men to get out as quickly and quietly as possible.
“I don’t say that all the guests were drinking. Only a small part of them were. I know that some of the best people in St. Louis were in the room, and I decided it was better for us to lose and retreat than to injure any of them,” he continued.
“We searched no hip pockets, but confined ourselves to examining what was on the tables. We found a number of glasses of whiskey, but they were taken from the guests. I understand that the trouble started when a number of the guests jumped upon one of the agents and took some whiskey he had found,” said Nations.
A Quiet Start
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Police officers from the Carr Street Station supervising the
draining of a mash vat in an illicit Franklin Avenue distillery during Prohibition. Photograph, 1920s. Missouri History Museum. |
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For all the hoopla on New Year’s Eve 1922, Prohibition in St. Louis had started quietly enough. Nationwide, temperance groups such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) had campaigned for years and gradually succeeded as various counties and communities in outstate Missouri voted themselves dry. Despite heavy opposition from residents of St. Louis and its vicinity, the Missouri legislature voted to ratify the federal Eighteenth Amendment in January 1919, a constitutional amendment that took effect one year later on January 16, 1920. It forbade the manufacture, transport, sale, import, and export of intoxicating beverages in the United States.
Making Headlines
The Hotel Chase fiasco made the front page of the New York Times on January 2, 1923: “Bullets, Chairs and Tableware Fly in Riot As St. Louisans Run Dry Squad Out of Hotel.”
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| Wayne Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League in Washington, D.C. Courtesy Library of Congress. | |
St. Louis’s melee was followed by a lawsuit by one of the wounded patrons, a mass meeting of citizens to protest the enforcement of the Volstead Act in St. Louis, condemnation of the revelers by local Methodist officials and Prohibition supporters, demands for Nations’s dismissal, and a scandal involving a prominent temperance official with the Anti-Saloon League. An ongoing debate ensued over Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) rights, godlessness, and lawlessness that included the Anti-Saloon League, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the Ku Klux Klan, a federal judge, and assorted clergy.
Missouri’s state Prohibition director, William H. Allen, and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department each investigated the raid and concluded that their men behaved appropriately. Prohibition agents Hogg and Gatter were whisked off to special assignments outside St. Louis. Ulman accused Nations of leading an illegal and unconstitutional raid on his hotel, whereas Nations cited Ulman as the only hotel proprietor who refused to cooperate with Prohibition agents in their New Year’s raids about town.
The mass meeting drew more than 2,200 angry men and was organized by former U.S. District Judge Henry S. Priest, a Westminster Place resident and former president of the Missouri Bar Association who also was president of the Missouri branch of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). The AAPA supported modification of the Prohibition amendment to allow beer and light wines. Priest was joined by a committee of some of St. Louis’s leading businessmen, who introduced resolutions calling for the resignation of Allen and Nations.
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Pro-Prohibition cartoons showing a woman in a red light district
and a man labeled a "Wife Beater" wearing a "Save St. Louis" button. Engravings, early 20th century. Missouri History Museum. |
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In the meantime, 33 congregations of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in St. Louis pledged their support of Nations and Allen. One of the ministers, Rev. Marvin T. Haw, characterized the Chase revelers as “the mob in decolette” and “parlor bootleggers.”
Likewise, Rev. W. C. Shupp, superintendent of the Missouri Anti-Saloon League, attacked AAPA as a “mouthpiece of the big breweries” in a speech that same day at Elmbank German Methodist Church. Shupp and his organization wielded a great deal of influence with Prohibition forces. Although he was not present at the Hotel Chase on New Year’s Eve, Shupp reportedly said of the raid, “If there had not been ladies present, my man Gatter would have shot up the place.” Publicly, he denied making the statement.
On the Stand
Pazdera, one of the shooting victims, filed a $20,000 damage suit against Shupp and Det. Sullivan. During depositions on January 19, Daniel Bartlett, Sullivan’s attorney, charged that a conspiracy was afoot at Hotel Chase to resist officers, “even to death.” Bartlett maintained that the orchestra played “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here” as a pre-arranged signal to guests that Prohibition officers had entered the hotel. He also pledged to “put 2,400 witnesses on the stand—every one who was a guest in the dining-rooms of Hotel Chase on New Year’s Eve.”
“I hope I live long enough to finish this case,” deadpanned Lee Meriwether, Pazdera’s attorney.
Witness Herbert H. Piou of University City said, to his knowledge, the orchestra never interrupted a waltz to play “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” Piou testified that he was hit in the eye when he protested to a dry officer who had grabbed his wife by the arm and threatened to arrest her.
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| Bartender Alex Piantanida and unidentified bar maid serve a couple at the Old Rock House Saloon. Photograph by St. Louis Globe-Democrat staff photographer, 1930s. Missouri History Museum. | |
Shupp, a co-defendant in the suit, soon had larger matters to deal with after investigators for the AAPA testified Shupp accepted a $500 bribe to endorse a local business owner’s application for an alcohol permit. During Prohibition, companies could handle and dispense alcohol for legal purposes, such as production of extracts, if they secured a permit from Prohibition authorities. Shupp never was formally charged with any wrongdoing.
One day after he testified in a deposition in the Pazdera suit, on Febuary 1, 1923, Shupp took to his bed with a nervous breakdown at his home. On March 17, he announced his resignation from the Anti-Saloon League, citing health concerns. A day later, Pazdera dropped his suit after Shupp agreed to pay approximately $250 of the $800 in court costs.
Enforcement Easy-over
Gus Nations left his post in 1924 to enter the Republican primary for state attorney general. In subsequent years, enforcement on New Year’s Eve took a more subtle approach. By December 1930, the hotel hip flask seizures were history, federal prohibition director Col. Amos W. W. Woodcock declared. Instead of frisking individual violators, agents were ordered to concentrate their efforts on commercial dealers.