Battle with the Bottle
Groups fought to keep North Dakota 'dry'

By Jack Sullivan
The Forum

For 17 years, it was against the law to sell liquor and food in the same North Dakota establishment. No peanuts in a liquor store. No beer in a steakhouse.

The liquor-food divorcement law, adopted by voters in 1946, showed "people are demanding a closer regulation of this evil in our midst," Attorney General Nels Johnson said in 1947.

Whether evil was regulated in Fargo and other North Dakota cities is unclear. But it is clear that the unwieldy law made for good business -- in Moorhead, where restaurants thrived serving demon rum alongside flame-broiled steaks to Fargoans.

The liquor divorcement era is one chapter in North Dakota's uneasy relationship with the bottle.

As the first state in the Union admitted with a prohibition clause in its constitution, North Dakota didn't want much to do with booze from the start.

Drys and 'blind pigs'

At North Dakota's constitutional convention in 1889, an influential Casselton lawyer, Robert M. Pollock, proposed a clause that prohibited the sale and manufacture of liquor.

At the convention, "temperance people denounced the lawlessness of the saloonmen," who in some areas dominated the selection of local officials, writes Col. Clement A. Lounsberry, who founded the Bismarck Tribune and, in 1919, wrote the Early History of North Dakota.

The drafters agreed on the prohibition clause. But they submitted it to voters separate from the draft constitution because they were afraid prohibition might doom the entire document, according to historian Bill G. Reid, writing in a chapter of The North Dakota Political Tradition, published in 1981.

Territorial voters approved the prohibition clause by 1,159 votes. Saloons were outlawed, beginning July 1, 1890. Admitted dry, North Dakota had a hard time keeping itself from getting wet.

Germans in western North Dakota resented prohibition, which they thought was "forced upon them by Scandinavians in the Red River Valley," Reid writes.

And illegal taverns, called "blind pigs," kept the booze flowing to those who knew where to go. Blind pigs drew the wrath of volunteer enforcement leagues, and, at times, the violent attention of mobs. The June 5, 1912, edition of the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican recounts a mob's attack on a blind pig in Wyndmere.

The Richland County town "appeared as if it had been struck by a cyclone yesterday," and as residents found torn lumber littering the streets, they realized "that the blind piggers of Wyndmere had been reduced in number by one."

Residents were "awakened and terrified" the night before "by a howling mob making the night hideous."

"Boisterous and indecent language was used. Many shots were fired, and the shooting was heard in every part of the town .... It is believed that no arrests will be made, as similar occurrences are not unusual in Wyndmere."

In Fargo, "jag wagons" carried patrons from North Dakota across the Red River into Moorhead, where taverns thrived with the business.

Legal as one-way transportation, jag wagons at times were caught in illegal activity. Two jag-wagon drivers, Olaf Jenson and Harry Hall, were arrested in 1905 and accused of selling liquor in Fargo, where residents would telephone Moorhead taverns and ask for liquor to be delivered in Fargo.

"The arrest of Hall and Jenson is the beginning of a crusade against the practice of Moorhead saloonkeepers of selling liquor on telephone orders. Recently the telephone trade has been very brisk," the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican reported.

From the turn of the century through national prohibition, the drys fought off attempts to legalize liquor in North Dakota, thanks in large part to Elizabeth Preston Anderson.

Elected president of the North Dakota Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1893, Preston Anderson led the group for 40 years, traveling across the state organizing local temperance unions to work against those who would do away with prohibition.

She "always attended the legislative sessions, where she worked without cessation, night and day, to prevent the repeal of the law," Lounsberry writes. "... The friends of temperance owe a debt of gratitude to this fragile little woman who successfully combated every movement of the liquor forces."

Temperance was one of many causes for Preston Anderson. She fought the state's 90-day divorce law, which attracted the wealthy from throughout the country to Fargo, where they lived in hotels for three months before ending their marriages. And she was instrumental in securing North Dakota women the right to vote.

'Gunfire halts rum car'

The 18th Amendment brought Prohibition to the United States in 1920 -- and brought the organized crime and bootlegging that followed to North Dakota. "Gunfire Halts Rum Car Near Mapleton," The Fargo Forum reported in a breathless 1930 account.

"Its rear tire shot away by the accurate fire of Cass County deputy sheriffs -- its driver face to face with Sheriff Mark Andrews and a high caliber rifle -- a speeding car, almost out of control, containing 20 gallons of alleged alcohol, was halted near Mapleton today after a running gun fight of more than a mile."

Federal prohibition officers raided illegal liquor operations across North Dakota during the 1920s. In 1923, a 100-gallon still was smashed on a farm near Medina, between Bismarck and Jamestown. The "largest still in N.D. history" was taken in 1928, a 14-foot long, steam-operated contraption seized in Mandan.

In February 1924, the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican reported, "Cass County sheriff's office men" and federal agents wrecked what one agent called "one of the most complete distilleries ever discovered in eastern North Dakota."

The 50-gallon still was in a shack on the Sheyenne River about a mile and a half south of the West Fargo packing plant. It was operated day and night "to turn out 30 gallons of bliss and forgetfulness each 24 hours."

All but seven gallons of liquor were dumped in the river, "and the agent who performed this work declared that the alcohol in it melted the ice for 25 feet around while the fish lined up at the bar."

In 1932, North Dakota voters chose -- by a margin of 35,000 -- to repeal state prohibition, and it died as the 21st Amendment to the constitution repealed federal prohibition. Liquor was legal for the first time since North Dakota was born.

The divorcement era

It wasn't prohibition, but North Dakota voters again restricted liquor sales in November 1946, when they passed the liquor-food divorcement act.

The divorcement law, then-Attorney General Johnson told the United Temperance Movement of North Dakota, "would take the glamour out of the liquor trade."

"They'll be no more fancy eating places where our women and children can get a bottle of beer with a sandwich," Johnson said in his 1947 speech. "To get a drink now they'll have to go to a bar, which at the best are not attractive places."

The 1946 vote was not without irony. In that postwar year, North Dakota drinkers consumed a record amount of hard liquor, based on a comparison of liquor taxes.

But after the vote, they couldn't drink that liquor in a restaurant. Nor could they buy a snack in a bar.

"You couldn't even sell a candy bar or a pickled egg in a bar at that point," said Bill Fortune III, whose father, Bill Fortune Jr., ran Fargo's Famous Five Spot at Broadway and Second Avenue North.

As North Dakota's prohibition clause made for a boisterous business in Moorhead taverns at the turn of the century, the liquor-food divorcement law made for full tables at Moorhead restaurants.

Bill Kenney bought the Silver Moon Cafe, on Moorhead's Main Avenue, in 1946.

"It didn't make any sense, because if you're going to have some drinks you should be eating," remembered Kenney, 87.

Divorcement was a tide that raised all Moorhead restaurants, he said. "It was really pretty good. We had the Rex, the Moon, the Black Hawk and the Gopher Grill. And then the Treetop came in."

The Silver Moon grew to fill three storefronts on the north side of Main Avenue, between Third and Fourth streets.

Kenney went into the restaurant business after leaving the Navy, where he served as a hospital corpsman. The Park River, N.D., native had operated a 3.2 beer parlor called "Bill's Club" in Moorhead from 1938 to 1942, when he enlisted.

His Silver Moon Cafe burned in 1967, when a fire in an adjoining business spread and forced 350 diners to evacuate. He later bought the Gardner Hotel in Fargo, where he ran the Gardner Silver Moon Cafe until 1974, when he retired from the restaurant business.

There were exceptions to divorcement, the largest for fraternal clubs, like the Elks and Eagles, which could serve meals and liquor. "And they served good food,"

Kenney said. Kenney and his wife, Lil, now spend summers in Moorhead and at Lake Melissa, near Detroit Lakes, and their winters in San Diego. Reminiscing at their Moorhead home, the couple took out a 1950s-era menu from the Silver Moon. The most expensive item was the filet mignon: $4.50.

Even that price was extravagant, compared to what preceded it. Kenney remembered a conversation with waitresses when the wholesale price of lobster tail went up. He thought he'd have to raise the price on the menu.

"Nobody will pay $4 for a meal," a waitress told him.

Fortune said his father bought the Five Spot, once a city landmark, in 1956. When the divorcement law was struck down by voters in 1964, the bar started selling sandwiches, chips and other sundries. Other bars opened kitchens and started serving meals.

Kenney said Moorhead restaurants didn't suffer after the law vanished since they'd been able to build up their clientele.

"It was good business all those years, even after the divorcement went out, because they didn't have the fast food then. And people were accustomed to going over to Moorhead."

Fortune kept the books for the Five Spot as a teen-ager, working outside the bar. In 1974, father and son left Fargo and bought a hotel, bar and restaurant in Owatonna, Minn. The Five Spot burned down in 1975, along with most of the block where it was located. The elder Fortune passed away last year.

Now living in Brainerd, Minn., Fortune said he can't understand why the divorcement law was ever seen as a good idea; eating food while drinking liquor is encouraged, since the food can slow the speed of a drinker's intoxication. "Like Mr. Spock would say on 'Star Trek,' there was no logic to it," Fortune said.