99. Mabel Walker Willebrandt — First Lady of Law

KIM: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…

AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. Today we’re going to talk about a lost lady of law enforcement. Her name was Mabel Walker Willebrandt and she was the Assistant Attorney General of the United States from 1921 until 1929. That made her the highest-ranking woman in the federal government at the time and, you could argue, the most famous woman in America who wasn’t a movie star.

KIM: Oh my god, this is so cool! As part of her role at the Justice Department, she went up against some of the biggest bad guys in the country. For a woman to have this much power back in that time period… I mean, we probably don’t really have to explain how unusual that was, right? She landed the job at the age of 32, only 9 months after women got the right to vote!

AMY: Yeah, that’s so surprising to me, and also, 32 still to this day seems surprisingly young for a role like that, right? Not that she wasn’t qualified or capable, but she was only five years out of law school when she landed this job.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: However, it’s almost laughable once you think about what her role actually was at the Justice Department. So she took on the job and was subsequently tasked with enforcing the Volstead Act, otherwise known as the National Prohibition Act. (The 18th Amendment was passed in 1919.) She was tasked with making sure nobody was drinking booze.

KIM: Okay, so you see… you’ve got to laugh here! Let the woman do that impossible and thankless task! The job no one else actually wants, right?

AMY: Right. Like, “I get to be the buzzkill, gee, thanks, fellas.” But lest you think Mabel Walker Willebrandt was some sort of prude who hated alcohol, no — she personally opposed Prohibition (as did most Americans… it was an extremely unpopular law and she liked an occasional glass of California wine, you know, so I’m sure she was kind of annoyed that this was going to be her scope of work, but she took her task of defending the Constitution seriously. It earned her nicknames like, “Deborah of the Dry,” “Mrs. Firebrand'' and “Prohibition Portia.” 

KIM: Oh, good Lord.

AMY: Now, she did actually become a teetotaler upon taking the job because she felt like she had to walk the walk if she was going to talk the talk. She wasn’t going to be a hypocrite about it. But she didn’t let anybody intimidate her, and she didn’t let anything stop her when it came to doing her duty, including the fact that she was nearly deaf (a fact most people were unaware of at the time.) She wore her hair in such a way that it hid the hearing aids she wore.

KIM: Wow. She sounds amazing. So what do we know about her life prior to landing this post? What’s her story?

AMY: She was born Mabel Walker in a sod dugout in Kansas in 1889. 

KIM: Cue the “Little House on the Prairie” theme music.

AMY: [hums it]. Her childhood was of the sort you’d read about in a Willa Cather novel.  And anybody who’s read those novels knows that it was a sort of brutal and demanding existence. Not quite the Michael Landon, “idyllic…” you know. Her pioneer parents were constantly moving from one failed farm and business venture to another. She was not raised to be “soft,” so to speak. One of her earliest memories was of a flash flood that overtook the family’s tent. So yeah, they lived in a tent at a certain point while they were being kind of itinerant. Her mom flipped over a kitchen table to serve as a raft until the water receded. She learned perseverance and determination from an early age in that life. 

KIM: Oh, wow. I have to say, my great, great grandmother came west in a covered wagon, and I did not inherit that pioneer stock, I don't think. I wish that maybe I was a little bit more… anyway, that's an incredible childhood. Wow. 

AMY: Do you know you can actually take vacations where you go in a covered wagon? Have you seen that?

KIM: Um, no, but I don't think I would want to do it even… 

AMY: I think it would be fun. I would totally do it. I mean, knowing that it would end. 

KIM: Yeah. As long as there's reading time built into the.. 

AMY: Yeah, you're sitting in that wagon all day bumping around and you've got nothing else to do. 

KIM: It probably has good biscuits. Anyway, we're getting off on it.

So back to Mabel, she started formal schooling at the age of 13. Her questioning nature later got her into a bit of trouble. She was actually expelled from a Presbyterian College for questioning the doctrine of the virgin birth. 

AMY: Understandable.

KIM: Yeah, exactly. I mean, everyone was thinking it anyway.

Eventually she embarked on a teaching profession, where she really knew how to lay down the law quite early. There’s one anecdote in which she threatened to discipline a boy with a rod and he came at her with a knife. She managed to wrestle the knife away from him and followed it up with what she described as “an enthusiastic licking.”

AMY: Don’t mess with Ms. Walker! She eventually moved to Pasadena in Southern California, where she served as, I think she was teacher and principal of an elementary school while at the same time attending law school at the University of Southern California. So I don’t know if she was doing night classes or what, but she was working her butt off! She became the first female public defender in Los Angeles with a special focus on prostitution cases, in particular. She was really irritated by the fact that the “johns” were rarely brought to justice while the women were taking all the punishments. She ended up representing about 2,000 prostitutes in police court. And one of the things she would do was she would kind of insist that if the women were going to be prosecuted, their Johns needed to be there also. So in that sense, she was kind of working to get, you know, a little bit of equity in what was happening here.

KIM: Yeah,  as it's still being worked on today anyways. So how did she end up working for the federal government?

AMY: Okay, so her predecessor in the assistant U.S. attorney general job was Annette Abbott Adams. She was the very first woman to hold the job, but she didn’t last long there. (She was only there for about a year.) So getting back to what we said earlier about women having recently gotten the right to vote, a lot of Republican politicians were eager to please all these new women voters, which they thought they could do by appointing another woman to replace Annette Abotte Adams. So Mabel Walker Willebrandt was starting to get noticed by progressive Republicans in California and they urged President Harding to consider her for the job. She did worry at the time that she was just being hired as a “token woman.”

KIM: Understandably. She was the token woman!

AMY: She was. And they were going to give her the crappiest task on earth. But she was also quoted as saying, “I am enough of a feminist to hold the opinion that there is no professional or public duty which a woman is not capable of performing.” So there! (She didn’t say “so there.”

But I also should mention, she’d never even planned on being a prosecutor, that kind of role. She had always enjoyed being a defense attorney and ideally what she wanted to do was move into civil law. So when she took the Assistant Attorney General job she’d never even actually prosecuted a single case, which is crazy.

KIM: That is crazy, wow. So she met with President Warren Harding as a formality before taking the job and he joked that she had only one actual shortcoming: her youth. And Willebrandt assured him that was something she’d outgrow. 

AMY: Oh, yeah, she’s got the political parlance. 

KIM: Yep.

AMY: “I can give a soundbite for the press that sounds good.” And yeah, she did, she really was good with all that stuff. So she earned the nickname “the Queen” by her staffers and she did receive the same salary as members of Congress, which I think is really nice. The law enforcement agents out in the field working under her orders were known as “Mabel Men.” The press, meanwhile, was too focused on the dresses she wore or her hairstyle du jour, more worried about that than her actual professional qualifications, which she hated, or you know, anything she was actually doing on the job. So there was even an article admiring the loveliness of her hands! I mean, that’s so stupid! She once said, “Why the devil they have to put that ‘girlie girlie’ tea party description every time they tell anything a professional woman does, is more than I can see.” (Speaking of her appearance, I’m going to do it for a second because I think she bears a resemblance to Angelina Jolie if you google her. Check that out and see if you agree. I think I could see Angelina playing her in the biopic.)

KIM: And so with all this, naturally, reporters were also inquisitive about her love life, too, the details of which she always kept under wraps. The skinny on that is, she was married to a man named Arthur Willebrandt, but they had been estranged for about five years when she took the job with the Justice Department, which is also interesting.

AMY: It’s very interesting. I think this was a guy she had met when she was first a teacher in wherever she was in middle America. I think he was a principal of a school she was teaching at, and they got married, but it sounds like that marriage fell apart because she felt like she was the one making all the sacrifices. She was the one who’d worked to put both herself AND him through law school, and she just felt he wasn’t pulling his weight. So she was done. At one point later she wrote that a wife should be concerned with “the preservation of her freedom, her self-respect her intellectual and executive attainments, her economic independence….finding the best outlet for her energies, finding the best protection for her spirit, and establishing a basis of mutual understanding with her husband in order to have both ‘a child’ and ‘a job’ if she wants both.” How modern is that?

KIM: That is so modern! I mean, and once again, we’re talking about the same things now. It’s just so crazy. She is amazing. So in addition to keeping mum about the details of her personal life, she also really didn’t want her colleagues or the country at large to know about her deafness. It’s not entirely clear to us what led to her hearing loss, but it was definitely something that added to her professional challenges, as you could imagine. 

AMY: Yes. In a letter to her parents she wrote, “The dread shadow of deafness all but submerges me. For Mama and Papa, dear, when from every quarter and indirectly… I hear the most extravagant marvelings at my capacities over the way I handle myself before the court, and when presiding over conferences, that surge of bitterness rises even at their praise when I think, ‘Damn you, you think that’s good, do you know what I could do if I weren’t struggling under the most horrible handicap that you do not guess.” Which gets us to our next point, really, which is, you know, what was she doing? She was not just some government paper-pusher. No. To put it bluntly, she was going toe-to-toe with some of the most brazen mobsters in America!

KIM: Yeah! I mean, enforcing Prohibition, it meant going after all kinds of bootlegging operations and big-time rum-runners and prosecuting the likes of crime bosses like George Remus and Al Capone (among many others) She was NOT intimidated by these guys or their goons! (And I bet those guys hated being taken down by a woman.)

AMY: Yeah, and she did so using pretty clever tactics, because the Volstead Act itself – the thing she was supposed to be enforcing – was kind of toothless and almost impossible to actually enforce. So she came up with this workaround of going after the bootleggers for income tax evasion. And that’s how she got them several times.

KIM: Oh my gosh! I know that that's how they also continued to get people in the mafia later, even. So I didn't know she actually started that. That is so cool.

AMY: I don't know if it was specifically her idea. I think it may have been, I think she was like, “What are we going to do? And  this was the means to do it.”

 KIM: That’s incredible. So in his documentary on Prohibition, Ken Burns spends some time diving into Mabel Walker Willebrandt. It’s easy to find clips from that online if you want to check it out. And if anybody watched the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, you’ll probably remember Mabel Walker Willebrandt was one of the characters in that show, too. 

AMY: Yeah, that’s a really good one to binge if you’re looking for something new. They have a lot of the real-life characters, the real-life gangsters, and Mabel. Also, I read a great book which talks about the crazy cat-and-mouse games Mabel had to run with the larger-than-life bootlegger out of Cincinnati, George Remus. It’s a book called The Ghosts of Eden Park by Abbott Kahler who previously wrote the book under the pen name Karen Abbott in case you want to check out a copy. So thanks to Kahler and that book, actually, because it basically inspired this episode… It’s a thrilling story centered around Remus’s murder of his wife, and it gives a much fuller picture of Willebrandt’s uphill battles to take him down throughout the years.

KIM: So despite the many challenges (and the lack of support, both publicly and within the government) Willebrandt was really good at her job. She stood up for herself — she didn’t always follow orders if she thought they were dumb. She also saw a lot of corruption in the government and FBI ranks, and she was often infuriated when her colleagues refused to take her expert advice. She thought her boss was kind of an idiot.

AMY: He probably was. Actually, I love this quote of hers… she said this at a dinner for the League of Women Voters In 1924. “Corruption in high places is only a boil on the body politic; it will recover. Women always are the wielders of the soap.”

KIM: I love that! She was attempting to clean up Washington — which still hasn’t happened!

AMY: Nope. Eventually she officially divorced that husband, which the press had a field day reporting on, as you can imagine. She did have another suitor at this time; a man named Fred Horowitz (and Kim, you’ll love this) He is the guy who built the Chateau Marmont here in Los Angeles, which we love!

KIM: Yes, we love the Chateau Marmont.

AMY: We used to go there, right? We should go again.

KIM: We should. 

AMY: Fred wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t ready to jump back into marriage. Instead, one of the first things she decided to do after the divorce was adopt a baby from an orphanage. She named her Dorothy. So she took on single motherhood!

KIM: I just couldn’t love her more. She’s very modern and incredible. After Herbert Hoover was elected president, Mabel sort of assumed that she was a shoe-in for the position of attorney general — she had helped campaign for Hoover, after all. But he ended up choosing someone else instead (a man.) And this felt like a slap in the face to Willebrandt, who ended up resigning.

AMY: I can’t blame her. And honestly, she was there for a good many years too. She was probably just ready to move on if she wasn't going to get promoted. So after leaving the Justice Department she moved back to California and opened a private practice, and what’s really interesting is that one of her first clients was an association of California grape growers who made table wine under a loophole of the Volstead Act! (So, irony!) She was now helping people who were doing the very thing that she was just fighting against,  which caused her to be criticized as being a trader to the prohibition movement. And you know what? She did not care.

KIM: Hey, as long as the table wine was good, right?

AMY: Talk to the hand, people. She went on to represent some aviation companies which led her to befriend the aviator Amelia Earhart, which I love. I can see the two of them getting on like gangbusters. She also had Hollywood Clients like Jean Harlow and Clark Gable and director Frank Capra.

KIM: Okay, so much more fun doing this type of law! 

AMY: Yeah, you hang on to Al Capone, I’ll go hang out with Clark Gable instead. She was a lifelong Republican, although she did admit later in life that she had an affinity for John F. Kennedy saying, “I do not like Nixon; I do not trust him.” 

KIM: Her instincts were dead on, right?

AMY: Yeah, but it just shows she thought independently.

KIM: Yeah. Upon her death in 1963 (I think she was about to turn 74 years old) one federal judge noted: “If Mabel had worn trousers, she could have been president.”

AMY: We’re still waiting on that! At the end of her stint with the Justice Department, she actually wrote a book called The Inside of Prohibition, and just a few other fun facts: She was interested in astrology and the occult and she also took daily ice cold baths.

KIM: Ooh, interesting. 

AMY: She had to steel herself, maybe.

KIM: Yeah, wow. Maybe that’s how she kept her energy up. What I love about her story is that she just put her nose to the grindstone even at a task that others would consider Sisyphean.

AMY: Right. She was tasked with this incredibly difficult job and she would be damned if she didn’t succeed at it. And you know, in her mind, a law was a law until that law was repealed (that didn’t happen until 1933. That’s when the 18th Amendment was done away with).

KIM: Okay. The irony is, after working a government job with a bunch of corrupt, probably chauvinistic men, the one thing she probably most needed at the end of each work day was a drink!

AMY: Totally. Maybe she wasn’t taking ice cold baths. Maybe she was making some bathtub gin!

KIM: Yeah, that’s what it was. I love that.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. Tune in next week when we’ll be picking up with another forgotten female author you should know about.

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.