Prohibition in the United States

“ In states like Oregon and Washington, which went dry long before national Prohibition became an established fact, the people were obtaining anything they desired. Close to the border, there is plenty of bootlegging, endless daring adventuring in the liquor traffic, many a bold plunge over the line to bring whiskey and gin into United States territory.
And they certainly bring it. Meanwhile, the propaganda of the Puritans goes on—or, rather, the impropaganda; for it is not true that people are behaving themselves. ”

“ There may be multi-millionaires in the United States who will finance campaigns abroad, just as it has been rumored repeatedly with what regularity certain rich advocates of Prohibition have contributed to the American cause. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If aid were needed to support this view of the matter, it would be found in the fact, conceded by the government's brief, that during the entire life of the National Prohibition Act, a period of ten years, the executive departments charged with the administration and enforcement of the act have uniformly construed it as not including the purchaser in a case like the present; no prosecution until the present one has ever been undertaken upon a different theory ”

“ Total prohibition may produce suffering, and may manifest a spirit of unfriendliness towards sister States; but prohibition, except upon conditions derogatory to the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United States, is mischievous, and productive of hostility and disloyalty to the general government. ”

“ He was the author of the famous prohibition law enacted by the Maine Legislature in 1851, and traveled widely in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, speaking on temperance questions and helping in the organization of societies for the furtherance of the reform. In 1880 he was the Prohibition candidate for President of the United States. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Penalties and forfeitures imposed by the National Prohibition Act for offenses committed within the territorial limits of a state fell with the adoption of the Twenty-First Amendment. United States v. ”

“ People therefore feel in their hearts that they are confronted practically with no other choice but that of either supinely 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thousands of good, well-informed citizens of this country, high in public and social life, many of these leaders in religious sentiment and thought, are united in the belief that Prohibition begins at the wrong end of the matter, and they renounce it as not only weak, inefficient and impractical, but destructive to the American ideals. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Prohibition is at least a superstition, and therefore next door to a religion; it has some imaginable connection with moral questions, as have slavery or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to model ourselves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget that there are States which punish the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air. The same American atmosphere that permits Prohibition permits of people being punished for kissing each other. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Congress is privileged to define what constitutes an intoxicating beverage; and the Volstead Act is not static. The people will elect men to represent them at Washington who will liberally interpret the Eighteenth Amendment. Therein lies the remedy for much of our discontent.
Prohibition rose, like a great wave; it is falling back now. The tide comes in, but it goes out again. And one can begin to hear the surge of a mighty people. They will speak at the polls, in every election; for Prohibition, until it is modified, will never be taken out of national politics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When attention is called to the wholesale disregard of the law, contempt for the law, and hostility to the law which is so manifest in the big cities, the champions of Prohibition in the press--including the New York press--never tire of saying that it is only in New York and a few other great cities that this state of things exists. ”

“ It is chiefly in a small, but extremely prominent and influential, body of over-sophisticated people--specialists of one kind or another--that the principle of liberty has fallen into the disrepute to which I have referred. The prime reason why the Prohibition law is so light-heartedly violated by all sorts and conditions of men, why it is held in contempt by hundreds of thousands of our best and most respected citizens, is that the law is a gross outrage upon personal liberty. Many, indeed, would commit the violation as a mere matter of self-indulgence ”

“ In addition to the vile and poisonous substitution for whiskey so largely consumed, and in addition to the increased drug habit since Prohibition, Prohibition has made a nation of grouches. It has taken the joy out of the American people, as can be attested by almost every social gathering. The whole scheme is unwarrantable interference with the personal freedom of the people, and increases discontent and resentment in the knowledge that those who have it, have it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eugene W. Chafin, Prohibition candidate for president, in 1912, said:
“I don’t want any person who claims to be a party Prohibitionist—a middle-of-the-road Prohibitionist—ever to sign another petition, or ask Congress or any legislature anywhere under the American flag to pass any prohibitive laws on the liquor question. We don’t want any laws of any kind whatever passed. All we want is to be elected to power.... Elect us to power, and we will repeal a few laws and do the rest by interpretation of the constitution and administration of the government.” ”

“ The Prohibition Amendment is not merely an impairment of the principle of self-government of the States; it constitutes an absolute abandonment of that principle. This does not mean, of course, an immediate abandonment of the practice of State self-government; established institutions have a tenacious life, and moreover there are a thousand practical advantages in State selfgovernment which nobody will think of giving up. But the principle, I repeat, is abandoned altogether if we accept the Eighteenth Amendment as right and proper ”

“ A law the violation of which in the class of instances in which the Government does seriously undertake to enforce it--bootlegging, smuggling and moonshining--is condoned, aided and abetted by hundreds of thousands of our best citizens? ”

“ Before dismissing this subject it will be well to consider one favorite argument of those who contend that Prohibition is no more obnoxious to the charge of being a violation of personal liberty than are certain other laws which are accepted as matters of course. A law prohibiting narcotic drugs, they say, imposes a restraint upon personal liberty of the same sort as does a law prohibiting alcoholic liquors. ”

“ The people who object to Prohibition are exultantly told by their masters that it is idle for them to think of throwing off their chains; that the law is riveted upon them by the Constitution, and the possibility of repeal is too remote for practical consideration. Thus the one thought that might mitigate resentment and discountenance resistance, the thought that freedom might be regained by repeal, is set aside ”

“ Left to impractical theorizing, Prohibition is harmless: allowed to enter the realm of civil government as a practical working force, it becomes dangerous, threatening not only one liberty, but all the liberties of the people. ”

“ The effect of Prohibition, sumptuary law enacted in government, upon the political fabric of the government, should claim the serious attention of American citizens particularly. We can hardly recur to the consideration of this subject too often.
Prohibition is essentially a repressive measure, and all history shows that repressive measures, under ordinary conditions, not only fail, but worse than fail. In aiming to do away with one evil, Prohibitionists set up a vastly greater one. In our American political life the very worst political conditions may ensue. ”