Like Remus, Willebrandt had always felt destined for grand and public endeavors. A persistent sense of melancholy had chased her over the years, and leaping into the unknown proved to be the only certain cure. “For all of my life,” she wrote, “I have had the most uncanny feeling against which I have often struggled, that seems always to say to me, ‘You are marked to step into a crisis some time, as the instrument of God.’ It seems that it may mean danger or disgrace, or in some way cause me agony of the heart, but I can’t escape it.”
A call from an old law professor had led to this new and intriguing path. There was a vacancy at the federal level, he explained: Annette Abbott Adams, the assistant attorney general during Woodrow Wilson’s second term, had resigned, and Republicans—eager to curry favor with recently triumphant suffragists—wanted another woman to replace her. Soon after this call came a telegram from Attorney General Daugherty, imploring her to come to Washington to meet President Harding.
For the first time in her life, Willebrandt hesitated.
* * *
—
She certainly had the temperament for the job. Born in a sod dugout on a remote Kansas plain, Willebrandt had come up in the waning decades of the American frontier, a time and place that demanded the same resourcefulness of women as it did of men and that punished them with equal severity if they failed to comply. Her home was a nine-by-twelve-foot tent, pitched and struck on plains in Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma, her parents fleeing natural disasters and chasing unsustainable dreams. One of her earliest memories was of a flash flood rampaging through their tent, her mother overturning the kitchen table to use as a raft until the waters receded.
Her parents, both descendants of German pioneers, worked tirelessly to shape her character. Once, when she was seven, her father scolded her for “acting like a child,” a rebuke she took as a compliment. “He must think of me as bigger, older, and with larger capacities than a child! To what seven-year-old is that no inspiration and challenge!” When she bit a pet cat’s ear, her father bit hers in turn. She developed a ruling philosophy, to which she would adhere for the rest of her life: “Look above and beyond the immediate task.” Before she milked the cow on their Kansas farm, she carefully arranged the animal toward the west so that she could view the sunset as she worked. “Life has few petted darlings,” she always said, and she did not consider herself one of them.
At age thirteen she began formal schooling and cast her mind in all directions, analyzing every fact it caught. After challenging a principal on the doctrine of the virgin birth, she was promptly expelled. When she began her own teaching career in 1908, she assembled a résumé claiming a nearly unfathomable range of expertise: English language, English literature, English composition, grammar, elocution, penmanship, American history, modern history, English history, ancient history, Latin, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, nature study, botany, zoology, biology, physiology, physiography, civics, geography, pedagogy, public school music, freehand drawing, domestic science, household economy, clay modeling, and even gymnastics and baseball. She did not abide disrespect from her students. On one occasion, after threatening to discipline one boy with a rod, he attacked her with a knife. With one deft move, she wrested the weapon from his grasp and delivered what she later termed an “enthusiastic licking.”
She moved to South Pasadena, where she not only served as principal and eighth grade teacher at Lincoln Park Elementary School but also attended law school full-time at the University of Southern California. During her last semester, she worked pro bono in the police courts, wielding her ferocious intelligence and fearless demeanor on behalf of her exclusively female client base. As Los Angeles’s first female public defender, she argued two thousand cases, with a particular focus on prostitution. Infuriated that “johns” were rarely apprehended and forced to appear in court, she utilized a procedure that enabled her defendants to request jury trials—thereby making the men’s presence mandatory. She avoided sentimentality in favor of honest, pragmatic support. When one client, a madam, sought advice about “going straight,” Willebrandt assessed the woman’s finances, determined that she could retire after six more months, and even loaned her some money to help with her fresh start.
She could have continued in private practice, working on mortgage cases and volunteering as a public defender, but Washington beckoned. Her bank account was so depleted that she had to borrow train fare and a new blouse to wear once she arrived. On the morning of her meeting with Harding, she took her daily ice-cold bath and fastened her hearing aid, on which she’d increasingly depended over the previous few years while straining to hear witnesses and the mutterings of opposing counsel. The bathroom mirror reflected her face, unpainted and unpowdered and dominated by her eyes: large and deeply set, absorbing everything but reflecting little back, collecting secrets while betraying none of her own. For one hour she painstakingly styled her hair so that it concealed the hearing aid and then tucked the batteries into her bosom.
Willebrandt had several misgivings about the position. For one, she had never planned to become a prosecutor, always having enjoyed “being on the other side.” Her long-term ambition was to practice civil law, not criminal. She would have to disengage entirely from her private practice, leaving her partners to fend for themselves. Disquieting questions took root in her mind: What if she were a mere token, a woman meant to do nothing but check a box? Would she find herself in a vacuous, toothless government post, catering to cronies rather than upholding the law?
Harding managed to put her at ease. She liked him immediately, finding him “tall, benevolent, interested, and gracious.” His “irrepressible friendliness” appeared to be both his greatest strength and most evident weakness. She sensed that he preferred privacy and quiet to the bustle of public life, an inclination she well understood.
* * *
—
The job of assistant attorney general would be like none she’d ever held before; in fact, like no job anyone had held before, as it involved an entirely new division of the Justice Department focusing on an entirely new law. She would be in charge of federal income taxes, prisons, and, most important, all issues relating to the Volstead Act. That she herself had not supported Prohibition—and, before its passage, had enjoyed the occasional glass of wine—would not deter her from ruthlessly enforcing it.
She had to prepare herself for the scale of the task. The United States had two long, craggy borders and eighteen thousand miles of coastline, all of it unnervingly porous. Airplane fleets smuggled gallons of liquor from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, where it was hidden beneath bales of hay and transported by truck. From Canada, eight to ten fleets landed each night at different spots on the Michigan peninsula, guided by searchlights. During their daily dumps in the Atlantic Ocean, New York garbage scows met with rum ships and hauled spirits back to shore. There were liquor-filled torpedoes landing on Long Island, liquor in bottle-shaped buoys waiting to be collected, ships hauling liquor in dummy smokestacks, specialized “liquor submarines” that raised and lowered out of sight, and seagoing tugs with compartments hiding enough liquor for thirty New Year’s Eve parties—all of them slipping past the Coast Guard, whose men were paid to look the other way.