Mabel walker willebrandt catholic

Second in a series of profiles for Women’s History Month.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt, one-time public defender and tax lawyer to the stars, is best known as the highest-ranking woman in the U.S. government during the 1920s. As assistant attorney general, she steadfastly prosecuted the Volstead Act during Prohibition, sometimes using tax laws to put away top-level rumrunners.

Born in 1889 in Kansas, Mabel traveled in a covered wagon in 1893 to Oklahoma territory with her mother, Myrtle, and father, David Walker, a German immigrant and newspaper printer. The family moved to Missouri, where Mabel entered school at age 13 and proved to be a fast learner. Her family pulled up stakes to Michigan where she passed a school teacher’s exam without a college degree. While a teacher in 1910 she met and married her school’s principal, Arthur Willebrandt. Because of her new husband’s tuberculosis, they decided to leave for Arizona and its dry climate.

Mabel at the time suffered significant hearing loss and went to great lengths to hide her hearing aids beneath her hair. While in Tempe, Arizona, she suffered a miscarriage and could no longer have children. She worked as a teacher and finished her teaching degree at Arizona State University in 1911. She and Arthur moved to Los Angeles a year later. Mabel was appointed principal of an elementary school in Pasadena.

Within several years, after taking night classes part time, she earned a law degree from the University of Southern California. Mabel had supported Arthur while he took law classes full time, but her faith in their marriage ended when he declined to return the favor. They separated in 1916. She worked briefly as a defender in police court and then accepted an offer to be the first-ever female public defender in Los Angeles County. All the criminal cases she defended involved women, frequently those held on prostitution charges. She made her mark on a

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Her enemies called her “Prohibition Portia” and “Deborah of the Drys.” Her admirers called her the “First Lady of Law.” And in 1928, all but her closest friends called Mabel Walker Willebrandt “anti-Catholic.” The accusations came in the wake of Willebrandt’s vigorous campaigning against the Catholic Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith.

For eight years, beginning with her September 27, 1921, appointment as assistant attorney general, Willebrandt led the federal enforcement of prohibition. At the time of her appointment, she was only 32 years old and neither a teetotaler nor a fan of prohibition. But Willebrandt believed the law was the law and understood that accepting the appointment meant agreeing to enforce the laws, whether she liked them or not. And enforce them she did. 

Describing her job as “attempting to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter,” Willebrandt oversaw more than 50,000 prosecutions of prohibition violators, all while cleaning up massive corruption in federal law enforcement. Ambitious, intelligent, and disciplined, Willebrandt did nothing halfway, which explains why she publicly went on the offensive against Smith, who as governor of New York made no secret of his disdain for prohibition. 

In addition to arranging raids in New York perfectly timed to humiliate the governor, Willebrandt also denounced him in Scripture-laced speeches before prohibition’s strongest supporters: Protestants. In one such speech, delivered to a Methodist ministers’ conference, she urged her audience to “Take to your pulpits! Preach the message! Rouse your communities!” Almost everyone in America, Smith included, accused Willebrandt of playing the religion card. She denied it, but to no avail.

After President Herbert Hoover’s victory, Willebrandt expe

American Assistant Attorney General

Mabel Walker Willebrandt (May 23, 1889 – April 6, 1963), popularly known to her contemporaries as the First Lady of Law, was an American lawyer who served as the United States Assistant Attorney General from 1921 to 1929, handling cases concerning violations of the Volstead Act, federal taxation, and the Bureau of Federal Prisons during the Prohibition era. For enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, the prohibition against the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, she also earned herself a nickname “Prohibition Portia”.

Early life and career

Willebrandt was born Mabel Elizabeth Walker in Woodsdale, Kansas, on May 23, 1889. Her father, David W. Walker, edited a local newspaper. In February 1910, she married Arthur Willebrandt, the principal of the school where she was teaching, and they moved to Phoenix, where he recuperated from tuberculosis while she finished college and supported them on a teacher's salary. She graduated from Tempe Normal School, later Arizona State University, in 1911.

In 1912, the Willebrandts moved to Los Angeles, where she taught elementary school and attended night classes at the law school of the University of Southern California. She received her law degree from the University of Southern California in 1916 and an LL.M. a year later. During her time at USC, she was a member of Phi Delta Delta legal sorority. The Willebrandts separated in 1916 and divorced in 1924.

During her last semester of law school, Willebrandt began doing pro bono work in the police courts while still teaching full-time. Ultimately, she argued two thousand cases as the city's first female public defender for women in Los Angeles, handling mostly cases of prostitution. She acted as counsel on more than 2,000 cases. Her efforts led courts to permit the testimony of both men and women. She also campaigned successfully for the

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

During the 1920s, there were few women in America with the prominence of United States Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt (1889-1963), whose task of enforcing Prohbition along with other responsibilities, gave her a highly public, though sometimes controversial, persona. While she was not a native of greater Los Angeles, she first garnered attention here as an early female attorney and Republican Party stalwart which was her entre into national law and politics.

She was the only child of David W. Walker and Mabel Eaton and she was born in Woodsdale, Kansas and lived in small towns in Oklahoma and Missouri before the family moved to Kansas City, where she attended high school. She attended the Ferris Institute, now a state university, in central Michigan and, at age 20, married Arthur Willebrandt, a fellow school teacher. She then attended the Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University, to complete her teacher education.

When her parents moved to greater Los Angeles in the early 1910s, first settling in Buena Park in Orange County and later on a chicken ranch east of San Gabriel, Willebrandt took a job teaching in South Pasadena and rose quickly to be principal of the school. She had higher ambitions, however, and enrolled in the University of Southern California’s law school, becoming one of the very few female graduates in the school’s history when she earned her degree in 1915.

Willebrandt immediately took a position as a public defender for women withe Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office and it was said she worked on 2,000 cases over the last half of the decade. After a few years, she went into private practice with a couple of male classmates from U.S.C. She also achieved regional notoriety for her advocacy of women’s rights in the issue of community property and, as a gifted public speaker, gave many addresses to women’s clubs and other organizations for a 1920 state