Identification Card for Prohibition Agent Daisy D. Simpson (“Lady Hooch Hunter”), 9/6/1921

File Unit: 8321 [Daisy D. Simpson] - Federal Prohibition Agent, 9/6/1921 - 9/6/1921. Series: Identification Card Files of Prohibition Agents, 1920 - 1925. Record Group 58: Records of the Internal Revenue Service, 1791 - 2006

One of the most interesting people featured in the now-closed “Spirited Republic: Alcohol and American History” exhibit was Daisy Simpson. Simpson was one of the Treasury Department’s most famous Prohibition officers (called “prohis”).

Known as the “Lady Hooch Hunter,” Simpson quickly attracted attention—and press—with her spectacular busts of Volstead Act violators.

While women gained the equal right to vote 1920, gender-based assignment of tasks endured. Women worked in the Treasury’s Prohibition Unit, but their roles were limited to taking field notes or photographs for their male counterparts following a bust.

However, a few women managed to become field agents themselves—the most famous of these was Daisy Simpson.  A delinquent in her youth, Simpson spent many of her younger days in dingy dives, taking illegal drugs and hanging around with low-level gangsters. Eventually, she cleaned herself up and joined the morals squad of the San Francisco Police Department during World War I.

Simpson rapidly became a star in the sensationalist press of the 1920s. Her fame came from chasing down bootleggers and working undercover on the streets of San Francisco, but she also worked special assignments as far afield as Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York.

Not everyone, however, was so enamored with her style. Her raids and arrests nabbed low-level distributors more often than the crime bosses the justice system desperately wanted to prosecute. More than one judge complained about the number of trivial cases Simpson’s evidence brought to trial or dismissed a case because of entrapment. Although her tactics were not uncommon of Prohibition agents, that did not mean they were always legal.

Simpson’s successful captures of bootleggers and rumrunners, however, was not enough to help her escape the gender discrimination of her times. In 1925 a San Francisco Treasury Department official banned women from serving as field agents. Simpson, unwilling to face life behind a desk as a secretary or stenographer, resigned her post soon thereafter.

Unfortunately, Simpson’s post-prohi days were not so wonderful. She slipped back into the seedier side of life shortly after she resigned and was picked up in March 1926 on drug charges in El Paso, Texas…

More on Daisy Simpson at On Exhibit: “Lady Hooch Hunter” | Prologue: Pieces of History 

While the exhibit has since closed, you can learn more about other Prohibition Agents in the free Spirited Republic eBook: