Raymond S. Spears

“ Fear makes the liquor runners drive fast. They go forty miles an hour, say. They don't slow up when meeting other cars—one sign. They have the hard, set faces of violators. They make quick stops, with screaming brakes. They may have new, beautiful cars, but the cars are apt to be untidy and carelessly driven. They draw up to certain gasoline pumps, where stores, garages, and gloomy soft-drink roadside businesses stand, none of them showing much business activity. ”

“ And the places where the traffic finds its customers, the hotels, the soft-drink places, the drug stores, the restaurants, the tailor shops, the candy stores—they cannot keep from showing the signs of their wretched and clandestine trade. The signs are not all legal evidence. The place of ill feeling may photograph exactly like an honest business; but the police, the prohibition agents, the sheriff's appointees, newspaper men, and the drinkers all become familiar with what they know is but a hunch, for they cannot often trace the identification to positive indications. ”

“ Let me remark that the chances are nearly ten to one that a stranger will now be asked to go to church rather than to have a drink. And in the automobile camp-grounds, which are found in most of the towns strung along the automobile trails like the Lincoln Highway, the National Old Trail, the Mohawk Trail, the Chicago-New York, and other familiar automobile routes, the tourists ask where restaurants, or groceries, or motion pictures may be found, and rarely seek liquor. A few do sometimes ask caretakers where liquor can be found. ”

“ In even crossroads hamlets of the land now short-order places are found, and every town has its eating-place for the passer-by. They do a thriving business where they couldn't survive the saloon free-lunch competition in liquor States, or even in blind-tiger States. In my own town, of 12,000 inhabitants, there were sixty-seven saloons before prohibition, and not one restaurant—a hotdog wagon alone survived free-lunch competition. ”

“ If one watches the automobile traffic for a few hours where there is bootleg traffic, certain outfits stand out prominently. Down the Mohawk Valley, down the highways into New York City, across New Jersey, out of Boston, east and west between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, around Sandusky, and between Toledo and Detroit, any one can soon learn to distinguish the illicit traffic. ”

“ Liquor has shrunk from the communities of the land. The casual passer-by through Texas, through any New Mexican town, sees no indication of it except in about two out of a hundred communities. Main Street is rid of liquor. In the old days, if three or four men gathered in a hotel in a town, even on a street corner, the first thing was, "Let's go have a drink." ”

“ But the stranger who does not know where it is may go far and snoop much before he can put his lips to the glass. Arrests of automobile drivers for intoxication are frequent in Memphis, but let me say I did not see one car in hundreds that, on the great drive or in the streets, seemed erratic from liquor. The wild alcoholic revelries of the highways may exist now, but not with curtains up and visible from the street. ”

“ In hundreds of communities it does not obtrude itself upon any one. That much prohibition has done for the country. I drove my two sons and my wife seven thousand miles last winter, and before that eight thousand miles on a round trip from coast to coast, and in all that distance there wasn't any place that would invite any of us in to have a drink.
Tell me the country is wide open? I've seen twenty thousand miles of highways, from San Diego to Portland, Maine, since prohibition came, and in all that distance I have been invited into just two blind tigers. ”

“ Tell me prohibition isn't working? If it isn't, why don't we see the liquor game played everywhere, instead of only furtively and at rare intervals? Drive from ocean to ocean, from border to border—ten or twenty thousand miles. The stranger will not see liquor in any form. It has vanished from sight. The stranger takes his life in his hands if he tries to find it. so afraid is liquor of, being found out. ”

“ None of the outfits are easy under scrutiny. Curtains are apt to be up, caps or hats drawn down to hide features, collars turned up, and the license numbers are generally bedeviled, plastered with mud or spattered with paint, tar, or other veil. ”