National Prohibition Act

“ To uphold the contention of the government, therefore, the language of section 10 must be taken to apply not only to those who hold government permits authorizing them to deal in intoxicating liquors under a familiar system of regulation, to whom it admittedly is applicable, but to every criminal violator of the National Prohibition Act, even though making only a single, isolated sale. ”

“ While the provisions of the National Prohibition Act limited these authorities for a period, the United States Supreme Court has held that the earlier laws enacted for the control of Indian country are not inconsistent with and were not repealed by the National Prohibition Act. To-day, an Indian Agent has practically all the original power with which to curb the liquor traffic within his jurisdiction. ”

“ True it is that after this court's decision in the Olmstead case Congressional committees investigated the wire-tapping activities of federal agents. Over a period of several years bills were introduced to prohibit the practice, all of which failed to pass. An Act of 1933 included a clause forbidding this method of procuring evidence of violations of the National Prohibition Act. [5] During 1932, 1933 and 1934, however, there was no discussion of the matter in Congress, and we are without contemporary legislative history relevant to the passage of the statute in question. ”

“ Gloss, 256 U.S. 368, 41 S.Ct. 510, 511, 65 L.Ed. 994, one imprisoned for transportation of intoxicating liquor in violation of § 3 of the National Prohibition Act, instituted habeas corpus proceedings to obtain his release on the ground that the Eighteenth Amendment was invalid because the resolution proposing it declared that it should not be operative unless ratified within seven years. ”

“ The Springfield Republican says, Quote The establishment of national prohibition by Federal statute, through the mere act of Congress, does not appeal to one as so desirable as the establishment of national prohibition by the direct action of three fourths of the states End Quote. The war-time Prohibition Law, according to the text of the Act, was enacted for the purpose of conserving the man-power of the nation and to increase the efficiency in the production of arms, munitions, ships, and for the Army and Navy. ”

“ The plea of majority rule is always a taking one in this country; and it is rarely that that plea rests on stronger ground than it would in this instance. The one strong argument which might be urged against the proposal--namely that such a provision would make Prohibition a constant issue in national elections, while the actual incorporation of Prohibition in the Constitution settles the matter once for all--has been deprived of all its force by our actual experience. ”

“ But in the case of the Prohibition Amendment, and of the Volstead act for its enforcement, there enters another element which must inevitably and most powerfully affect the feelings of men toward the law. Everybody knows that the law is violated, in spirit if not in letter, by a large proportion of the very men who imposed it upon the country. Members of Congress and of the State Legislatures--those that voted for Prohibition, as well as those that voted against it--have their private stocks of liquor like other people ”

“ National Prohibition in the United States --granting, for the sake of argument, that it expresses the will of a majority--is not a case merely of a greater number of people forcing their standards of life upon a smaller number, in a matter in which such coercion by a majority is in its nature tyrannical. The population of the United States is, in more than one respect, composed of parts extremely diverse as regards the particular subject of this legislation. The question of drink has a totally different aspect in the South from what it has in the North ”

“ That National Prohibition is an approaching enemy to free government, of which the people should be warned even at the risk of being grossly misunderstood, is my opinion. From the watch-towers of American liberty the warning should go forth. ”

“ The gravest reproach which attaches to that unfortunate act, the one which causes deepest concern among thinking citizens, does not relate to any incidental feature of the Prohibition manoevres. The fundamental trouble lay in a deplorable absence of any general understanding of the seriousness of making a vital change in the Constitution--incomparably the most vital to which it has ever been subjected--and of the solemn responsibility of those upon whom rested the decision to make or not to make that change. ”

“ And what concern can be so intimate as that of the conduct of the individual citizen in the pursuit of his daily life? How can the idea of the State as an object of pride or as a source of authority flourish when the most elementary of its functions is supinely abandoned to the custody of a higher and a stronger power? The Prohibition Amendment has done more to sap the vitality of our State system than could be done by a hundred years of misrule at Albany or Harrisburg or Springfield. ”

“ The final effect of the fundamental change in our Constitution involved in the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has not been, and cannot be, yet determined. All the evidence which we have seen, however, tends to show that the nation is better off materially and physically under102 Prohibition than under the system which permitted the sale of intoxicating beverages. Benefits to be derived from the elimination of the drink traffic did not wait upon our National experiment for demonstration. ”

“ And everybody knows that, in their private capacity, Senators and Representatives and Legislaturemen are precisely like their fellow-citizens in this matter. They may possibly be somewhat more careful about the letter of the law; they are certainly just as regardless of its spirit. With the exception of a comparatively small number of genuine Prohibitionists--men who were for Prohibition before the Anti-Saloon League started its campaign--they would laugh at the question whether they regard drinking as a crime. ”

“ WELL MEANING exhorters, shocked at the spectacle of millions of perfectly decent and law-abiding Americans showing an utter disregard of the Prohibition law, are prone to insist that to violate this law, or to abet its violation, is just as immoral as to violate any other criminal law. ”

“ To make conspicuous before the whole American people the fact that the law is being steadily and complacently violated in millions of decent American homes would bring about a realization of the demoralizing effect of Prohibition which its sponsors, fanatical as they are, very wisely shrink from facing. ”

“ Our journals do not make pleasant reading for good Americans these days. They are filled with headlines, which concern the Prohibition law, morning after morning. Not long ago I picked up my newspaper and found no less than seventeen columns devoted to stories of what the police in New York City alone were doing, or trying to do, to make the Volstead Act anything but a huge joke. ”

“ Something like that seems to be in the minds of the women whose communication we have received, who include item six in their program, but if so, their attitude is wrong. A constitutional amendment is not sacred, much less a Volstead Act. It is the Volstead law that the jokes on Prohibition are aimed at more than the amendment. If we cannot joke about an act of Congress, then indeed things have come to a restricted pass. If a law is bad, one of the ways to beat it is to laugh it out of court. ”

“ I am bitterly opposed to drunkenness. Prohibition has not cured it. We have had it long enough now to see its terrible errors. The lions have heard the crack of the whip, but instead of being overcome, overpowered, cowering in corners, we have the spectacle of a determination to pay no attention to the lashings of the law. Half of us willfully disobey this iniquitous legislation—and are proud of our disobedience. What is to be done about it? The more teeth that are put into the Volstead Act, the more teeth the lions show. They growl and fight. They will not be mastered. ”

“ I said, "that they are confronted with no other choice but that of either submitting to the full rigor of Prohibition, of trying to procure a law which nullifies the Constitution, or of expressing their resentment against an outrage on the first principles of the Constitution by contemptuous disregard of the law." It is a deplorable choice of evils; a state of things which it is hardly too much to call appalling in its potentialities of civic demoralization. ”

“ Judge Lindsay has laid his finger upon a moral danger which exists in the widespread levity towards an important section of our National Constitution. The same menace was singled out for warning by Prohibition Commissioner Haynes when he recently said: ‘One of the greatest dangers now confronting the Republic is that we may lose our vision of the sanctity and majesty of the law.’
“How shall we guard ourselves against this menace? The protection cannot be found merely in increased activity of the enforcement officials. It cannot be wholly met by the vigilance of the police. ”

“ And if the establishment of that precedent should fail actually to work so disastrous an injury to the cause of liberty, we must thank the wide-spread and impressive resistance that it has aroused. Had the people meekly bowed their heads to the yoke, the Prohibition Amendment would furnish unfailing inspiration and unstinted encouragement to every new attack upon personal liberty; as it is, we may be permitted to hope that its injury to our future as a free people will prove to be neither so profound nor so lasting as in its nature it is calculated to be. ”

“ The Prohibitionists fail to realize that Prohibition, for them, is in itself a debauch, a kind of wild orgy, a sadistic spree. To strap us all to the water-wagon, snap the whip and keep us there for life seems to be their idea of a good time.
209 The citizens of Massachusetts defeated a bill for additional State machinery to make the Volstead Act more effective; and in Illinois there proved to be a feeling of three-to-one in favor of light wines and beer. The rural districts of Ohio caused the Prohibitionists to gain a victory in that State ”

“ Then came a reaction, and even the stoutest opponents of the liquor traffic were forced to admit that in towns of any size prohibition has never yet been a success. As a leading reformer put it: “Prohibition has not yet touched the question where it presents the gravest difficulties, except to fail. After an existence of more than fifty years it has yet to grapple with this problem in any great centre of population. A law unenforced in its essential particulars debauches the public conscience.” ”

“ In order that a person should entertain a genuine feeling that the Prohibition Amendment is entitled to the same kind of respect as the general body of criminal law, it is necessary--even if he waives all those questions of Constitutional principle which have been dwelt upon in previous chapters--that he should regard drinking as a crime. ”

“ It is a choice of evils; and it is not surprising that many good citizens regard the last of the three choices as the best. How far this contempt and this disregard has gone is but very imperfectly indicated by the things which were doubtless in President Angell's mind, and which are in the minds of most persons who publicly express their regret over the prevalence of law-breaking. What they are thinking about, what the Anti-Saloon League talks about, what the Prohibition enforcement officers expend their energy upon, is the sale of alcoholic drinks in public places and by bootleggers. ”

“ It is safe to say that if the Eighteenth Amendment had undertaken to make the _drinking_ of liquor a crime, instead of the _manufacture and sale_ of it, it could not have been passed or come anywhere near being passed. There is hardly a Senator or a Representative that would not have recoiled from a proposal so palpably offensive to the instinct of liberty. Yet precisely this is the real object of the Eighteenth Amendment; its purpose and, if enforced, its practical effect is to make it permanently a crime against the national government for an American to drink a glass of beer or wine. ”

“ To say that there is a majority in favor of the amendment does not imply that there is not a large and active minority in favor of its repeal. The greatest problem confronting advocates of national prohibition lies in the fact that this large minority has not accepted the amendment with that good faith and willing spirit which we have grown to look upon as characteristic of the spirit of the losers in our political controversies. ”

“ The National Prohibition Committee can not afford to look on letting matters take their course. The time has arrived for action on its part, that it may set the example before the world what the party it represents will do if placed in power. The very soul of every prohibitionist in the nation ought to be on fire in a determined fight for the triumph of prohibition in bleeding Kansas. I believe the struggle being had there now means more, either for the weal or woe of this country, than did the struggle against slavery on the same soil by John Brown and his followers. ”

“ It is true that the individuals whom the Government hunts down by its spies, its arrests, its prosecutions, are men who make a business of breaking the Prohibition law, and most of whom would probably just as readily break other laws if money was to be made by it. ”

“ There has never been a time when deliberate disregard of law was habitual among the classes which represent culture, achievement, and wealth-- the classes among whom respect for law is usually regarded as constant and instinctive. That such disregard now prevails is an assertion for which President Angell did not find it necessary to point to any evidence. It is universally admitted. Friends of Prohibition and enemies of Prohibition, at odds on everything else, are in entire agreement upon this. ”