M.S. Hawie: An Arab American Poet and Orator Makes a Prohibition Record in 1920

M.S. Hawie: An Arab American Poet and Orator Makes a Prohibition Record in 1920

M.S. Hawie in the 1920s.  Courtesy of Elizabeth M. (Hawie's niece).

 By 1920, over a half dozen immigrants from Greater Syria had recorded for Columbia Phonograph Company, and slightly under a dozen total had recorded for Victor or Columbia together. Whether Arabic music sold well for either of the big phonograph record giants remains unclear, however, by the 1920s, these companies began to record fewer and fewer Arab American and Arab immigrant musicians and independently-owned Arab American record labels like Maloof and Macksoud emerged in their place. M.S. Hawie stands out in Dick Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Records and in UCSB’s Discography of American Historical Recordings database as one of a dozen early Arab Americans to record not a song, but recitation of a speech called “Goodbye Whiskey” on Columbia in 1920. The recitation, of course, was an ode, of sorts, to Congress' passage of the Eighteenth Amendment which banned manufacturing, selling and transport of alcohol in the United States. To bolster the power of the federal government to enforce the Amendment, Congress also passed the National Prohibition Act or Volstead Act. Prohibition lasted over a decade and Congress ended it by 1933 with passing the Twenty-first Amendment.

M.S. Hawie recorded the spoken  piece "Goodbye Whiskey" in Arabic at the beginning of Prohibition. 

Columbia #E5196, recorded 1920. Photo courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection.

https://soundcloud.com/user-387335530/ms-hawie-good-bye-whiskey-e-5196-columbia-1920

Prohibition’s impact was widespread across the United States and Arab American and Arab immigrant communities felt the influence of this new legislation as much as anyone. For one, most Arab immigrants to the United States were Christian. Even in some small Syrian and Lebanese American communities, like in La Crosse, Wisconsin, oral history notes that some Lebanese and Syrian residents of La Crosse left between 1917 and 1920 to settle in California to become involved in the wine industry; but this resettlement would have taken place during prohibition.  California’s wine industry seemed destined to collapse, except the reverse happened. While some wine growers replaced their vineyards with orchards, others doubled down and took advantage of loopholes in the Volstad Act. One such loophole, allowed continued production of sacramental wine for Orthodox and Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis. Furthermore, individuals with a household permit could possess up to 200 gallons of wine for personal use. No ban on grapes also meant vineyards sold concentrated grapes as “raisin cakes,” “wine bricks,” and “wine blocks,” with the idea that Section 29 of the Volstad Act permitted “applejack or blackberry wine on the legal fiction that a non-intoxicating fruit-juice for home consumption.” In La Crosse, all the saloons, including those owned by Lebanese and Syrians immigrants and citizens, disappeared. A number of Arab American and non-Arabs in La Crosse secretly sold alcohol in their converted soda fountains and ran into trouble with the law. A segment of Wisconsin’s population opposed and sought to repeal Prohibition by 1922. Bootlegging beer, moonshine, and other liquor became common practice and local Lebanese Americans like Carem Theep [along with non-Lebanese-Syrians Matt Schaller, John Kubiak, Matt Jacob Meinzer, and three others] received sentences of “a fine of $400) or “four months in the county jail of hard labor” for “cooking mash" in his home in the heart of La Crosse’s Syrian/Lebanese community. Theep and his brother immigrated to La Crosse from Racheya Al Foukhar, a town in modern-day Lebanon, known in the nineteenth century for its pottery and vessel making (Theep was from Rachaya al-Foukhar, known for its pottery making). Theep not only made his own arak, but made containers where he stored his homemade liquor. Federal Prohibition agents in western Wisconsin and their deputies dumped the contents of their bust into the La Crosse River, claimed the local Tribune. What is even more interesting and humorous about this story is that family lore suggests that Theep was, if fact, covering from his wife, the real mixologist in the Theep household.

Undoubtedly, stories like these circulated throughout Arab American communities in the United States. If fact, weeks ago in August 2020, historian Dr. Stacy Fahrenthold, author of Between the Ottomans and the Entente, tweeted a Prohibition-era newspaper clipping about the popularity of "Syrian Alcohol" or arak in Maine printed in the 3 February 1928, Boston Globe. In New York, closer to Little Syria, we can document speakeasies by the score, yet there seemed to be no known or documented speakeasies in Manhattan's Little Syria neighborhood. So, what do we know about M.S. Hawie? This is what we could find.

M.S. Hawie was born Melhem Saloom Hawie on 15 November 1882 to Shukralla and Marsha Hawie in Dhour El Choueir, Greater Syria (now Lebanon).  He was at least one of eight children. Dhour El Choueir is a town nineteen miles from Beirut, populated by mostly Orthodox, Melkite and Maronite Christians and known as the birthplace of Arab American writer Abraham Rihbany. In the Fall 1902, Hawie left Beirut, docked at La Harve, France and arrived in New York in 29 November 1902 onboard the S.S. La Touraine. After fifteen years in the United States, Hawie married his wife, Naffie, on 30 November 1916. According to the 1930 U.S. Census, Naffie immigrated to the United States around 1911 and she married Melhem when he was 25 and she was 18. This means that when Melhem filled out his World War I draft card in 1917, he had only recently married.

World War I draft card for Melhem Saloom Hawie, 1917. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Over the years, Melhem and Naffie moved to various addresses in Brooklyn and Melhem remained more financially well-off than many Syrian/Lebanese immigrants in the first wave. Upon his arrival in the Unites States, Melhem lived at 366 41^st Street and worked as an embroiderer.  In 1923, when Melhem applied to become a naturalized citizen, he resided at 4509 Sixth Avenue, and seven years later he worked as a real estate broker and lived at 225 Eleventh Avenue. Melhem and Naffie moved again by World War II, this time to 9269 Shore Road. Once an embroiderer and then a real estate broker, in his fifties Melhem ran an import business. Although well-known in Brooklyn’s Arab American community, he eluded press reports related to his life and only popped up in the Arab American or mainstream press on occasion.

Copy of first papers and Naturalization Application for Melhem S. Hawie. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

The few news clippings that mention Hawie make it quite clear that he was not a musician or a singer, but an orator. This explains why Hawie recorded a recitation or monologue on Columbia in 1920 instead of a song. While many believe this to have been Hawie's lone traceable recording, in the mid-1920s he also recorded a poem on Macksoud #1696 "Weedah el Kamrah." Also during the 1920s, M.S. Hawie was an active member and officer in the Damascus Lodge No. 867. At one point, he was the lodge’s Junior Past Master. The Annual Sales Congress and Conference of the Diefendorf Agency, part of the Brooklyn Branch of Mutual Life Insurance Company awarded Hawie “first prize for the best three-minute sale talk” in February 1925. 

M.S. Hawie recited a poem in Arabic at this Middle Eastern benefit, Brooklyn Eagle 29 August 1942. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

About two decades later, in December 1948, several musicians performed at a benefit for the American Middle East Relief at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, M.S. Hawie, however, recited a poem in Arabic, and others danced or performed in a dramatic play called, “The Tragedy of Palestine.” Nearly, a decade later a bride and groom called on Hawie to offer up a few words of inspiration and encouragement at the reception of the newly married Dr. Roderick A. Comunale and Yvonne Farkouh.  Similarly, when M.S. Hawie’s best friend and editor of the As-Sayeh newspaper, A.A. Haddad married in January, 1955, Melhelm stood as best man. Hawie’s international import business and political connections back in Lebanon and other places he did business drew him into diplomatic work. In 1958 – 1959, Hawie served on the Board of Directors for the International League for the Rights of Man, a group that served as consultants to the United Nations. His fellow masons at Brooklyn’s historic Damascus Lodge No. 867 F. & A.M. elected him Chaplain in 1959 as well.

M.S. Hawie was a active member of the Damascus Lodge No. 867 in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Eagle, 3 April 1928. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

Melhem and Naffie traveled several times to and from Beirut to visit family and Melhem maintained his import business. One of the flights when can document with certainty returned to the United States in August 1961, a few years before Congress would once again transform the relationship between nationality and immigration with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The new law struck down immigration restrictions enforced from 1921 to 1965 which limited immigration to the United States in a way that favored white northern and western Europeans. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act had limited the percentage of immigrants from each country to reflect the proportion of the nationality in the United States to 3% of that which lived in the United States in 1910; and the 1924 Immigration Act not only lowered that percentage to 2%, but moved the baseline year to 1890, years before many of the US’s Middle Eastern, Asian, and Eastern European immigrants arrived in significant numbers.

M.S. Hawie speaks at an event covered by NBC radio. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth M. 

By the 1960s and 1970s, Melhem’s brother George passed away, but two of his sisters moved to Mesa, Arizona. Melhem’s nephew Fareed recalled a time when Melhem visited relatives in Mesa and the family attended a spring training camp baseball game. Fareed’s mother, Helen Hawie Nader, was Melhem’s sister. Melhelm's niece remembered him as a kind and generous uncle who was perhaps especially kind to his nieces and nephews because he and Neffie never had their own children. When St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Brooklyn launched a $75,000 campaign to raise money for “restoration and revocation” in 1960, M.S. Hawie donated $50.Sources suggest that Melhem visited at least one of his sisters in Arizona since the 1940s and they continued to visit each other, and sometimes met up with their other siblings at remote locations.

The Hawie siblings, including M.S. Hawie, came from Arizona, Connecticut, and New York to visit Miami. Arizona Republic, 29 August 1942. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

In May 1976, Melhem Saloom Hawie died at the age of 93 in Brooklyn, New York. In the last years of his life he was honored by the Damascus Lodge F & A.M. as a past master emeritus and helped in the ceremonies to confer degrees on newer members. During that time, immigration to the United States from Lebanon picked up again as a result of people fleeing the Lebanese Civil War which began in 1975. The United States, of course, celebrated its bicentennial two months after Melhem Hawie's passing. 

Our copy of Hawie's "Goodbye Whiskey" turned a century old as this year marks 100 years since Prohibition began, the centennial of the 19th Amendment's passage, and one hundred commemoration of the Pen League (Pen Bond or al-rabitah al-qalamiyah).

An older M.S. Hawie (right) with two younger members of the Damascus Lodge.
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth M. 

Special thanks to Fareed N., Elizabeth M., Stacy Fahrenthold, and Matthew Empey. 

Richard M. Breaux

© Midwest Mahjar