Oshkosh Beer: Keeping Oshkosh Wet with Mayor McHenry

Oshkosh never gave in to Prohibition. This place was always a drinking town. No reactionary law contrived by bigots and bluenoses was going to change that. The personification of the city’s resistance was its outspoken mayor, Arthur Cicero McHenry.

Arthur C. McHenry

A.C. McHenry was an unlikely advocate for Oshkosh’s drinking culture. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1881, the son of a farmer. He took a busy and erratic path from there to here. By the time he was 30 McHenry had been a newspaper reporter in Chicago and St. Louis, studied law, fought in Cuba during the Spanish–American War, got married and had three kids, got divorced, got married again, and became a pastor in the Universalist Church.

His preaching brought him to Oshkosh. In the spring of 1912, McHenry was named pastor of St. John’s Universalist Church at the corner of Church and Union streets.

The former St. John’s Universalist Church.

McHenry was a different kind of clergyman. He was not of the fire and brimstone persuasion. The pulpit was his platform for delivering freewheeling monologues on personal liberty and human rights. He’d go after anyone he saw trying to oppress or exploit another: local politicians, fellow clergymen, factory owners. His parishioners loved it. McHenry became, perhaps, the best-known public intellectual in Oshkosh.

McHenry’s book Drops of Running Water, Poems of Life and Philosophy was released eight months after he arrived in Oshkosh.

McHenry’s influence quickly spread. He became a featured speaker at the Progressive Club meetings held at Al Cone’s saloon on Main Street. The Daily Northwestern called his lectures “brilliant and impressive.” But his chumminess with the saloon element didn’t sit well with some religious leaders in town. For decades they had agitated, to little effect, for broad restrictions on saloons. They accused McHenry of pandering and atheism. McHenry punched back calling the anti-liquor clerics “trouble makers who lacked the ability to create public opinion and sentiment on behalf of their reforms.”

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, October 22, 1912.

The former Home of the Progressive Club and Al Cone’s saloon at what is now 224 N. Main Street.

In 1918, McHenry announced that he was running for mayor. The first plank of his campaign was the promise to “know no distinction between the North side, South side, East side, or West side. The best interest of Oshkosh will be my motto!” His second declaration was the assurance that “I am not and have never been a believer in local or state Prohibition.”

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, March 6, 1918.

In the April 2nd election, McHenry faced Peter Marden, a bank president living on Algoma Boulevard. Marden was the establishment candidate. He cited his success as a businessman as his primary qualification. The Prohibitionists lined up behind Marden.

Peter Marden

McHenry won in a landslide, sweeping 10 of the city’s 13 wards and collecting a record-breaking majority of votes. That evening, supporters gathered outside McHenry’s home on Amherst Avenue. The Arion Band, 15 strong, arrived and began playing. McHenry gave a speech and “everybody shouted and hurrahed for the successful candidate.” For the first time, Oshkosh had elected a clergyman as its mayor. McHenry resigned his pastorship a week later.

The Arion Band.

There was nothing the mayor of Oshkosh could do to stop Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified eight months after McHenry took office. And on January 17, 1920, the nation went dry by law. As the police administrator, however, McHenry would oversee the enforcement of Prohibition in Oshkosh. Or lack thereof.

Oshkosh Police, 1920.

The law was clear: the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was strictly illegal. But under McHenry, the dry law went practically ignored. Ed “Slim” Suda, who ran beer for local wildcat breweries said, "The local police, they seemed to never bother the breweries. They were OK. They all drank it.”

The wide-open atmosphere caught the eye of federal agents. In May 1920, four months into Prohibition, the feds made their initial thrust into Oshkosh. They took down three speakeasies. It was more of a warning than a blitz. One of the raiding agents told a Daily Northwestern reporter that this was just the start. They’d be back.

A former speakeasy at 1601 Oregon. It was raided by federal agents on May 20, 1920.

Two weeks later McHenry announced that he would run for the US Senate on a stridently anti-Prohibition platform. He didn’t stand a chance. McHenry was unknown outside of Oshkosh. He got wiped out in the primary by the incumbent, Republican Senator Irvine Lenroot. Nevertheless, McHenry established his brand as he raced around the state giving rousing speeches, shouting “I hate Prohibition and will fight it with all of my heart and body and soul for as long as I live.” The Milwaukee Sentinel called it the “Gutes Bier uber alles” campaign. Good Beer above everything else.

Meanwhile, back in Oshkosh, the knives were being sharpened. In November 1920, a group of anti-saloon elites calling themselves the Good Government League began circulating recall petitions to remove McHenry from office. The group was led by Oshkosh lawyers Robert Clark and Emmet Hicks. It took them a month to collect enough signatures to force a new election.

Walter Marden ran against McHenry in the February contest. Marden was the brother of Peter Marden who McHenry had crushed in the 1918 mayoral race. Walter Marden was an ex-military man who had left active service two years earlier. Yet he still preferred to be addressed as Major. The Major promised that as mayor, his first order of business would be to take down the city’s bootleggers, moonshiners, and speakeasies.

Major Walter Marden

McHenry won in another landslide, surpassing his record vote total of 1918. The drubbing proved to be the last gasp of the pro-Prohibition cabal in Oshkosh.

That summer, the feds returned to town as promised. The raids of August 26, 1921, were a show of force.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 27, 1921.

McHenry was furious. He confronted the G-men at city hall and lit into them. “Mayor McHenry quite forcibly stated that the City of Oshkosh was not in sympathy with prohibition enforcement,” the Daily Northwestern reported. One of the agents claimed that McHenry tried to carry off evidence - a keg of moonshine - that had been deposited at city hall for safekeeping. As the mayor said, he’d fight them all the way.

His antics made news around the state. And so did the messy ending of his marriage. In August 1921, his second wife, Alma, divorced him. She said he had neglected her and was often away from home for days at a time and that he used profanity. She said he preferred the company of other women and was sometimes shacked up with a woman in the town of Omro. She said he liked to drink liquor.

Chatter about McHenry’s drinking and womanizing had trailed him for the last year or so. He was said to favor moonshine and gin fizzes. His reputation as a lady's man had been broached during the recall election. More than 50 years later, Jake Steckbauer still remembered McHenry dropping by his father’s saloon turned speakeasy at Sixth and Idaho. “Mayor McHenry used to come in,” Jake said in 1978. “All the women liked him."

Jake Steckbauer behind the bar at Steckbauer’s Tavern in 1975.

Around town he was known simply as Mac. And Mac had one more lark left in him. In 1922, he ran for Governor. It was another moonshot. He was challenging John J. Blaine, the progressive incumbent. Blaine’s anti-Prohibition stance made McHenry’s candidacy redundant. So what.

Mac went back to barnstorming around the state. He told anyone who would listen that Blaine was a dry in disguise. Nobody bought that line. McHenry got trounced in the September Republican primary. He pulled in less than 4% of the vote statewide. He didn’t even win Oshkosh.

In the run-up to the election, the Blaine campaign placed ads calling McHenry a joker in every major Wisconsin newspaper. This is a portion of one such ad from the Waukesha County Freeman.

To an extent, McHenry had become a victim of his own success at shaping public opinion. He had entrenched the city’s resistance to Prohibition. In Oshkosh, it was taken for granted that there was nothing honorable about the dry law. The anti-liquor crusaders had been forced from the moral high ground. That territory now belonged to folks who opposed Prohibition. There was no longer a need for a firebrand like McHenry.

His six-year mayoral term was ending. In that time, McHenry had built a roster of enemies at city hall. At the top of the list was Councilman John C. Voss.

John C. Voss

McHenry and Voss had been at each other's throats for years. The one thing they shared was their hatred for Prohibition. Before the dawn of the dry law, Voss had been a beer peddler for Miller Brewing. He began dabbling in politics in the 1890s. Voss was an alderman under the old system, served a term as mayor and city assessor, and became a fixture on the city council. Voss was also the ringleader of the old boys network at city hall.

Voss went hunting for a candidate to unseat McHenry. He found his man in Henry Kitz, a former alderman and council member. Voss helped get the 66-year-old Kitz back into city hall in 1923 as the municipal building inspector. The plan to have Kitz run for mayor was already in place by then. The backroom dealings would come spilling out just days before the April 1, 1924 election. It made no difference. Kitz defeated McHenry by 405 votes.

Henry F. Kitz

McHenry embraced the loss. “Perhaps it’s better for me that the contest resulted as it did,” he said. “I’m glad to get out of the mess at city hall. I feel I shall have stepped out of a prison.”

A reporter from the Daily Northwestern was more wistful about McHenry’s exit: “A.C McHenry goes out of office after an interesting if turbulent reign. Mr. McHenry went through a picturesque period in Oshkosh history, one that was marked with advancement and growth, providing a thrilling episode in the political story of Oshkosh.”

A.C. McHenry moved on. In August 1924 he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law. His first case was defending Kate Schiessel, a widow living on South Park, who got busted for making moonshine. McHenry got her case dismissed.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, October 11, 1924.

McHenry ran for office again in 1928. This time he tried to get elected as Winnebago County District Attorney. He was soundly defeated. In 1929, McHenry moved to Waukegan, Illinois where he continued practicing law. Later that year, he was charged with contempt of court in Waukegan after he punched an opposing lawyer in the face during a trial.

Arthur C. McHenry moved to Kenosha in 1954. He died there of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 75.