Taylor Swift’s character dies no more than 10 minutes into “Amsterdam,” a 1933 period piece so unprofitable and critically controversial that killing her off may have saved Swift’s career. Its other uber-famous bit player was Robert DeNiro. Half scene-stealer, half saving grace, DeNiro’s turn as a real-life decorated general who rejects a corporatist plot to install him as dictator breathed life into a film whose major stars never quite seemed to crack its morass.
The general in question, Smedley Darlington Butler of West Chester, Pennsylvania, had put down nationalist insurgencies around the world: Filipino anti-imperialists, Mexican reconquistadores, Chinese Boxers.
In the mid-1920s, Pennsylvania officials asked Butler to put down Philadelphia’s liquor industry. For nearly a half-decade after the country enacted the Prohibition, many major cities refused to take it seriously. Doctors prescribed spirits for ailments ranging from cold to chronic pain. The mafia built networks of bootleggers and speakeasies to meet public demand. And local law enforcement pocketed bribes as the price of looking away.
“Alcohol might have been illegal, but it was everywhere,” wrote American studies professor Stephen Nepa in an email interview with The Temple News.
The Fighting Quaker ordered raids on 900 speakeasies in his first two days as Philly’s public safety director and rooted out officials he deemed corrupt. But in December 1925, a chorus of local power brokers decried Butler’s closures of posh speakeasies. He resigned in disgust.
“Cleaning up Philadelphia is worse than any battle I was ever in,” Butler later said.
Speakeasies were moot once Prohibition ended in 1933. Yet the taste for their transgressive magic remains: Basement bars and Insomnia Cookies back rooms have taken to calling themselves “speakeasies.” And in a narrow, winding nook on the 1700 block of Rittenhouse Square, there sits one of Philadelphia’s two most prominent modern-day speakeasies, The Franklin Mortgage and Investment Company.
The Franklin, Friday night, dealt in neither: Its upper floors served as a rustic luxury hotel, governed by the ceaseless motions of a wiry, dreadlocked man named Stephen.
Yet clusters remained downstairs, at a dark green door at the lobby’s end. “Here for the bar?” he’d ask. No passwords, cover charges or even dress codes. All they had to do was nod, and he’d wave them into a barroom dimly lit by hanging lights.
Not exactly a secret space.
Head bartender Nico Diaz long worked at Philadelphia’s other speakeasy, the Ranstead Room. The Franklin first opened in 2009, shuttered during the pandemic, and returned with a vengeance in 2022, boasting not only a fresh menu of drinks but a calendar of special events and pop-ups.
Diaz found himself drawn to the challenge of helping revive a fabled, speakeasy-style cocktail bar. And he loved juggling interactions and expectations with and from The Franklin’s customers: It was a weekend, the room was abuzz and the head bartender was constantly behind the counter, beneath a shaker or beside a customer.
“The guest exchange is probably my favorite part of what I do,” Diaz said. “It’s why I’ve been doing this for so long.”
The Temperance movement didn’t just obsess about what people consumed. It fretted about who was allowed to consume it. The era’s press and pop culture cast Irish Catholics as unruly alcoholics, for instance; Mexican Americans found themselves associated with marijuana use. To control the use of substances was to control its users.
“There’s always been an effort, in America, to associate ethnic groups with substance abuse of some kind in an effort to justify prejudice, segregation and pushing them out of the mainstream,” said journalism professor Linn Washington, who routinely teaches about drugs, the press and the prevalence of ethnic stereotypes.
Temperance attempted to trim the definition of who was worthy to be American. Yet its megaphone, Henry Ward Beecher, became one of the nation’s leading abolitionists. Prohibition arose, not coincidentally, in an age of unprecedented racial terror and sexual angst. Yet speakeasies often ignored segregation laws and hosted drag performances.
Exclusivity is one thing today’s speakeasies don’t seem interested in.
“I think it’s important that the speakeasy doesn’t take itself too seriously,” said Diaz, as still more patrons from seemingly off the street streamed in and took seats. “I mean, how authentic of a speakeasy are you if you have an Instagram and a website with your address?”
Butler died in Philadelphia in June 1940, convinced that his military service had been, in his words, “a racket.” His crusade against fascism had nearly gotten him court-martialed; he died as the free world careened towards a fateful collision with Europe’s authoritarians.
Imperialism, corruption, alcoholism, fascism — the banes of Smedley P. Butler’s existence. If only he could see us now.
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