PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORSTTHE ALCOHOL INFORMATION COMMITTEE
PUBPOSE :
THE DISTRIBUTION' OF INFORMATION ON THE ALCOHOL QUESTION AND THE WORKING OF THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT
ABBOT, MR. WILLIS J. BLACKMAR, PROF. FRANK W. BOGARDUS, PROF. EMORY S. BROOKS, DR. JOHN GRAHAM CALLAHAN, COL. P. H.
CAPPER, SENATOR ARTHUR CARVER, PROF. THOMAS NIXON CATT, MRS. CARRIE CHAPMAN COCHRAN, MB. WILLIAM F. COOPER, HON. JOHN G., M.C. CURRAN, REV. FATHER J. J. DEVINE, DR. EDWARD T.
DEXTER, DR. WALTER F. EMERSON, DR. HAVEN FARNAM, PROF. HENRY W. FISHER, PROF. IRVING FISK, DR. EUGENE LYMAN FLINT, DR. CHARLES W. GARRETT, MR. ROBERT GEMMILL, JUDGE WILLIAM N. GILLIN, PROF. J. L.
GREEN, DR. RUFUS L.
HALL, DR. WINFIELD SCOTT HOLCOMBE, PROF. ARTHUR N. HOLMES, PROF. SAMUEL J. HOPKINS, JUDGE BICHARD J. HUDSON, HON. GRANT M., M.C. HUGHES, BISHOP EDWIN H. JORDAN, DR. DAVID STARR JUDD, MR. ORRIN R.
KELLOGG, DR. JOHN HARVEY KELLY, DR. HOWARD A.
KING, DR. HENRY CHURCHILL KNOLES, PROF. TULLY C. LASKER, MR. BRUNO
LELAND, MR. HENRY M. MCDOWELL, BISHOP WILLIAM F. MILLER, DR. FRANK A.
MOORE, MR. E. C.
MONTGOMERY, MRS. WILLIAM A. MOTT, DR. JOHN R.
MOULTON, DR. WARREN J. MULHALL, MISS SARAH GRAHAM-O'SHEA, PROF. M. V.
PEABODY, MRS. HENRY W. PENNY, MR. J. C.
PINCHOT, HON. GIFFORD POLLOCK, JUDGE CHARLES A. POLLOCK, DR. HORATIO M. REINHARDT, PRES. A. H.
REMICK, JUDGE JAMES W.
ROBINS, COL. RAYMOND ROSS, PROF. EDWARD A.
ROWELL, MR. CHESTER H.
SCOTT, MR. R. H.
SIMS, REAR ADMIRAL WILLIAM S. SMITH, MR. HENRY LOUIS SHEPPARD, SENATOR MORRIS STEARNS, MR. ALFRED E.
SUMMERS, HON. JOHN W., M.C. TAFT, MR. HORACE D.
TOWN, DR. CLARA HARRISON WATSON, DR. FRANK DEKKER WHITE, MR. WILLIAM ALLEN WILEY, DR. HARVEY W.
WISE, RABBI STEPHEN S.
WOOLLEY, DR. MARY E.
WILBUR, DR. RAY L.
YOST, MR. FIELDING H.
ZURCHER, REV. FATHER GEORGEPROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
BY
IRVING FISHER
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, TALE UNIVERSITY
Assisted by
H. BRUCE BROUGHAM
ALCOHOL INFORMATION COMMITTEE
PNE-FIFTY FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, N. Y,
1928Copyright, 1928, by IRVING FISHER
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
printed in the United States of America“PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST” IS PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OP THE “ALCOHOL INFORMATION COMMITTEE,” FORMED FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROMOTING THE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION ON THE ALCOHOL QUESTION AND THE WORKING OF THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT.
WHILE THE COMMITTEE IS ORGANIZED FOR THE PROMOTION OF SUCH LITERATURE, WE ALONE ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY STATEMENT OF FACT CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK.
IRVING FISHER.
H. BRUCE BROUGHAM.
October, 1928.TO
GIFFORD PINCHOT
GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1923-1927 WHO GAINED CONCURRENT ENFORCEMENT IN A WET STATETABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface........................... xi
Introduction ...................... xv
Part I—Still, At Its Worst
CHAPTER
I.	In a High-Powered Age?............. 3
II.	In Its Effects on Youth?.......... 25
III.	In the Attitude of Physicians?....	40
IV.	In Deaths from Alcoholism?........ 52
V.	In Poverty, Crime and Disease?.... 66
YI. In Increased Drunkenness?.......... 83
VII.	In Employment and Industry?...... 101
VIII.	In Corruption of Prohibition Agents? 117
IX.	In Appropriations for Enforcement? 131
X.	In Smuggling and Illegal Diversion
of Alcohol? .................... 143
XI.	In a Typically Dry State?......... 154
XII.	In a Typically Wet State?......... 180
XIII.	In the Nation's Consumption of
Alcohol? ....................... 202
XIV.	In Public Sentiment?............. 222
XV.	In Education for Temperance?.....236
XVI.	In the Light of Canada’s Experience? 249X
CONTENTS
Part II—What Shall We Do About It?
CHAPTER	PAGE
XVII.	Can Prohibition Be Repealed!...... 281
XVIII.	Can Prohibition Be Modified or
Nullified? ..................... 300
XIX.	Can Prohibition Be Enforced?...... 317
XX.	Confessions and Conclusions.......335PREFACE
In preparing this book as a sequel to “Prohibition At Its Worst,” I sent an identical letter of which the following is a specimen, to representatives of the leading organizations opposing and upholding the Eighteenth Amendment and the Prohibition Statutes, Federal and State:
Text of Letteb
I am enclosing herewith an outline, in chapter headings, of my book, “Prohibition Still at its Worst,” which is now in preparation.
In this book I shall assume, wherever the facts warrant the assumption, with respect to the enforcement of Prohibition, Federal and local ; the prevalence of drunkenness, disease, poverty and crime due to lax enforcement, and demoralization of the youth of the United States, that conditions have not bettered since the publication, in 1926, of my first book, “Prohibition at its Worst.”
Even if the facts should show that conditions have worsened instead of bettered or remained the same, it is my intention to publish them no matter how damaging they may prove to the cause of prohibition or how fully they justify the title of my book.
In each chapter, which will be approximately two thousand words long, the first half will be devoted to as strong a statement
XIas the facts themselves will permit for the case of prohibition still at its worst. In the preparation of statements, I have endeavored to obtain all the available data thus far published or issued. As a political economist and statistician, I wish to give my best efforts to strengthen such statements and to that end I solicit the personal aid of members of the Executive Committee and Directors of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.
The second half of each'chapter will contain as strong a statement of countervailing facts as I can obtain with the aid of responsible officials of the Anti-Saloon League and kindred organizations and their supporters. In this statement, as in the first, I will give my best efforts as a political economist and statistician to make the presentation effective.
In preparing neither of the two statements under each subject heading will opinions be sought, but only facts, which must be allowed to speak for themselves.
For expression of opinions of my own, I reserve only the final chapter entitled “Confessions and Conclusions.” This chapter, like the rest, will be limited to two thousand words. In it I intend to admit the force of certain criticisms of my earlier book, “Prohibition at its Worst,” and to state my conclusions upon the facts as presented in the later book.
In this spirit of fair and impartial inquiry into a subject that is of vital interest to thePREFACE
xiii
nation, I confidently ask yonr aid as a public-spirited citizen and responsible official of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.
From the sale of this book I shall reap no profit, and any returns beyond expenses will be devoted solely to its further circulation. The manuscript should be ready, if possible, by June 15th, next. Please let me know at your earliest convenience whether you can perform this public service.
After each chapter was drafted I sent a further letter to a list of Wet and Dry authorities, including those on whom I had drawn, asking further suggestions before sending the MS to the printer. This request was made of all my correspondents.
My own opinions of the facts thus elicited on both sides are to be found in the last chapter headed “Confessions and Conclusions.”
The conception and plan of the books are in response to what I consider to be a fair criticism of my earlier book, “Prohibition at its Worst,” that in it I made no attempt to summarize the evidence which the opponents of prohibition have marshaled.
In the present book I have tried thoroughly to correct this fault, and to present both sides without prejudice. How successfully I have done this is for the reader to judge.
Yale University.	Irving Fisher.
New Haven, Conn., October, 1928.INTRODUCTION
At the root of the Prohibition controversy is the question whether “moderate” alcoholic drinking is inherently harmful, and whether Prohibition in its aspect of compulsion is destructive of respect for law.
RELAXATION VIA PARALYSIS Wet View
Dr. Charles L. Dana, neurologist and formerly President of the New York Academy of Medicine; Professor E. H. Starling, of University College, London, co-author and editor of “The Action of Alcohol on Men,” and the late Professor Hugo Muensterberg, the Harvard psychologist, are quoted by Clarence Darrow and Victor S. Yarros in their book, “The Prohibition Mania; A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others,” as justifying the moderate use of beverage alcohol. Dr. Dana is represented as saying:
It is quite right to claim that alcohol makes our mental associations slower, but they interpret it as if that involved a destructive crippling of our mental life. They do not even ask themselves whether or not this retardation of association of ideas may not be a most helpful and useful relaxation of cer-
xvXVI
INTRODUCTION
tain brain centers. With the same logic they might demonstrate to us that sleep is a most ruinous invention of nature, as it paralyzes our brain centers still more; and they have not the slightest understanding of the fundamental fact that such inhibition in certain parts of the brain belongs to every single act of attention.
Messrs. Darrow and) Yarros record the following conclusions by Starling and his scientific helpers:
While alcohol is unsuitable for the highest mental efforts or during the performance of prolonged muscular feats, to individuals who need relaxation rather than increase of attention, or of nervous excitement, a small dose of alcohol may result in improvement of efficiency. Thus, a man’s play at golf may be improved by a glass of whiskey, and a shy man may be emboldened to make a speech or to comport himself naturally at a social gathering.
The narcotic action of alcohol on the highest centers of the brain is of value in freeing a man from the cares and worries of the day’s business, enabling him to digest and assimilate his food and to restore his ability to sleep.
In his book, “American Problems,” Professor Muensterberg supports with fervor the view that moderate drinking is beneficial, by virtue of its paralyzing action upon the nervous centers :INTRODUCTION
xvn
Of course, alcohol before serious intellectual work disturbs me; but hearing a hurdy-gurdy in the street or thinking of the happy news which a letter has just brought to me, or feeling angry over any incident, disturbs me just as much. It is all the same kind of interference ; the brain centers which I used for my intellectual effort are for a while inhibited and thus unfit for the work which I have in hand. When the slight anger has evaporated, when the pleasurable excitement has subsided, when the music is over, I can gather my thoughts again, and it is arbitrary to claim that the short blockade of ideas was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided the music or the pleasure or the wine.
Of course, if we consider, for instance, the prevention of crime, we ought not to forget that even some of these slight inhibitions may facilitate a rash, vehement deed and check cool deliberation. In times of social excitement, therefore, alcohol ought to be reduced. But again this same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol is in question, may result from many other causes of social unrest. The real danger begins everywhere with intemperance, that is, with a lack of that self-discipline which is not learned but lost under the outer force of prohibition.
Psychologically the case stands thus : alcohol has indeed an inhibitory influence on mind and body. The feeling of excitement, the greater ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength and joy, the forgetting of sorrow and pain—all are at bottom the result ofXV111
INTBODTTCTTON
inhibition; impulses are set free because the checking centers are inhibited. But it is absurd to claim from the start that all this is bad and harmful, as if the word inhibition meant destruction and lasting damage. Harmful it is, bodily and socially, when these changes become exaggerated, when they are projected into such dimensions that vital interests, the care for family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but in the inhibition itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest act of attention which does not involve such inhibition. If I read in my study, the mere attention to my book will inhibit the ticking of the clock in my room and the noise from the street, and no one will call it harmful. As soon as my attention increases and I read with such passion that I forget my engagements with friends and my duties in my office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact that the unbalanced attention makes me by its exaggerated inhibition quite unfit for my duties is no proof that the slight inhibition produced by attentive reading ought to be avoided,
The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have, in the right place, its very desirable purpose, and no one ought to be terrified by such physiological statements, even if inhibition is called partial paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but no education, no art, no politics, no religion is possible without such partial paralysis. What else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm but a reinforcement of certain mental states, with cor-INTRODUCTION
six
responding inhibitions—that is, paralysis—■ of the opposite ideas? If a moderate use of alcohol can help in this most useful blockade, it is an ally and not an enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness of the little miseries and of the drudgery of life, and thus set free and reinforce the unchecked enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if wine can make one forget the frictions and pains and give again the feeling of unity and frictionless power—by all means let us use this helper of civilization. It was a well-known philosopher who coupled Christianity and alcohol as the two great means of mankind to set us free from pain. But nature provided mankind with other means of inhibition; sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in the same direction; to inhibit means to help and to prepare for action.
.	. . Without the artificial inhibition of
the restraining centers the life of most men becomes a matter of mere business, of practical calculation and prosaic dullness. The esthetic side of life cannot come to any development because it is suppressed by the practical cares. The truly artistic mind, of course, does not need such artificial help. The finest enjoyment of art, of literature, and of music demands a mind in which the suggestion of beauty suppresses by itself all selfish and practical ideas. But the mass of mankind is differently organized. They need some kind of help to open their minds to the message of the unpractical and unselfish. , . . Better America inspired than Amer-XX
INTRODUCTION
ica sober, if soberness is to mean absolute abstaining! In the middle way between this kind of sobriety and intemperance lies that emotional stimulation which for the hard-working masses is an element of true civilization. Can we forget that in almost all parts of the globe even religious life began with cults of such artificial inspiration? For the Hindus the god Indra was in the wine, and for the Greeks, Dionysus. It is the optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional inspiration which alcohol has brought into the dullness of human days, and the history of culture shows on every page the high values which have resulted from it.
NEW INSTRUMENTS OF RELAXATION
Dby View
The late Professor William James used to comment on how hard it was to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and to insist that the pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the point of view of their opponents. So long as they proposed no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, they failed to realize the full inwardness of the situation. Just so supporters of the eighteenth amendment might listen with full sympathy when the apostles of moderate drinking declare man’s abiding need for relaxation and for respite from the petty worries and monotonies of existence.INTRODtrCTIOK
xxi
Professor Muensterberg, Dr. Dana and Dr. Starling are undoubtedly right in their psychological finding that this problem lies in the field of attention. But is resort to self-paralysis by means of a narcotic drug the proper, or only, means of relaxing the nerves of men? Are not better means at hand?
Muensterberg, in the passages quoted by Dar-row and Yarros, intimates that there may be more than one way of obtaining the relaxation needed. In McClure’s Magazine for August, 1908, he went so far as to say that he had himself become virtually a teetotaller, because he had discovered in his diversions, chiefly esthetic, a means of blotting out of his consciousness the worries from which others feel constrained to seek relief through the paralyzing effects of alcohol.
Since Professor Muensterberg wrote on this subject the radio and the movies have become the diversions of the masses. He lived long enough to write a book on ‘ ‘ The Photoplay, ’ ’ hailing it as a true popular diversion in the direction of art. Surpassing the radio and the movies is the influence of automobiles, of which twenty-three million have entered American life.
The automobile, itself an efficient substitute for the saloon, has given tremendous impetus to other powerful means of relaxing the multitude from commonplace cares. By its speed and controllability it has multiplied opportunities for travel,XXll
INTRODUCTION
camping, exploring, hunting, swimming, yachting, golfing, dancing, mountain-climbing, and for making business enterprise attractive and adventurous. It has occasioned the establishment of parks and playgrounds and the building of stadiums and amphitheaters for national sports exceeding those of ancient Greece and Borne. It has afforded the means of extending cities into suburbs and along splendid parkways and boulevards. It has knit the communities of America together with a network of highways and destroyed the provincialism of city and country life.
Thus in the two decades since Muensterberg uttered his famous defense of alcoholic beverages as answering a need of relaxation for the masses, the motor car, the movie, and the radio have quite transformed the conditions of mass existence. They have furnished abundant means of diversion from the narrow, slum-ridden life of a generation ago.
The more successfully the new pursuits of this age attract the distraught consciousness and restrict it to their objectives, the more refreshed the national life becomes. In the field of his enterprise the modern individual has become vividly alert and conscious. In his book, “The Body at Work,” a treatise on the principles of physiology, Dr. Alex Hill, formerly Master of Downing College, Cambridge, describes this process of invigo-ration as follows:INTRODUCTION
mu
The capacity for alertness is due to the favoring of one set of impulses by suppressing others. The favored impulses hold the road. Concentration of attention is keeping thought to one line by resisting all temptation to wander into by-paths. The waking condition is the state in which all nerve-ways are closed, with the exception of those which consciousness is using. The more severe the closure, the more vivid is consciousness.
Manifestly, Dr. Hill is discussing the same thing, that is, diversion of the attention by centering it on a single objective—the thing desired by Dana, Starling and Muensterberg in their discussion of drink—but with a difference. Closure or restriction of the field of consciousness, effected by centering upon a superior attraction or adventurous enterprise, tends to rejuvenate the individual. It fuses his scattered and distracted energies as the rays of the sun are focused through a lens to a single burning point. With this achievement comes a sense of release in which the faculties work unitedly, and with ease and power. They are relaxed, poised and centered.
But can the anti-Prohibitionist doctors properly ascribe to the deadening effect of alcohol on the nerve centers the same virtue of invigoration that belongs to every successful act of attention? Is the alert wakefulness of adventure the same thing as the drugged euphoria or joy of the “moder-XXXV
INTRODUCTION
ate” alcoholic drinker—a joy which, these doctors admit, is induced by partial paralysis of the nerves?
In both cases there is “inhibition,” but in only one of the two is there true paralysis. The inhibiting or relaxing of nerves produced by watching a baseball game is by way of withdrawing the attention from all other affairs and focusing it on the game, leaving the unused nerve centers inactive but uninjured, unparalyzed, simply resting and allowing all the more energy for the nerve centers which are used; while in the alcoholic case all nerve centers are actually more or less paralyzed. In sleep, on the other hand, all centers are at rest, but surely not paralyzed! Dr. Isador H. Coriat says: “Any theory of sleep must be based on sound psychological data, because sleep is a psychological phenomenon occurring in everyday life, and not a manifestation of a disease process. In interpreting sleep as a pathological phenomenon, the older theories signally failed.” And R. Clarke Newton, in his" treatise on “Opium and Alcohol,” says: “It is deceptive to give narcotics in a case of this type” (sleeplessness). “The stupor simply masks the danger. Better far let the sleepless patient exhaust himself than stupefy him.” Authorities describe the paralytic effect of alcohol as the illusion of renewed power without its reality, and leaving, even from “moderate” indulgence, injurious after effects, of whichINTEODUCTIOlSr	xxv
the chief characteristic is the inability to focus the attention.
Moreover, in the case of the “moderate” drinker, as experience has shown, there is always the danger of forming the habit of heavy drinking, with its far more destructive consequences.
In the field of enterprise, on the other hand, whether material, mental or spiritual, and in the hazards of adventure and sports is the open sesame to healthful relaxation, heightened powers, and the means of substituting better habits for worse. How an exchange of habits is effected is described by Hill, in the case of the golfer who makes his first successful drive:
In golfing terminology, a successful drive is always “an awful fluke”; but the fluke once accomplished, nothing is easier for the golfer than to drive equally well on all succeeding occasions. He need merely remember exactly what it felt like to give the club a perfect swing, and exclude all other sensations while he is passing these memories through his sensori-motor arcs!
The fact that we can deliberately improve an action, fitting it to the attainment of the object of desire, by suppressing wrong and emphasizing right sensations, shows how large a part consciousness plays in the affairs of the nervous system.
So by substituting the inspiriting sensations that accompany red-blooded enterprise and sportXXVI
INTRODUCTION
for the fitful illusions and depressions of alcoholic drink, a universal means of escape from the drink habit has been found. In this substitute for the vagrant imaginings and erratic acts of alcoholism the American people have discovered, not the reluctant compulsions of duty, but the allurements of realized adventure. In preferring the release by alcohol, Dr. Dana and his confreres depart from the ethical principle of their profession in advising general self-dosage by the masses with a habit-forming narcotic drug.
Everybody knows occasions in which there is no difficulty in laying aside all habits that might interfere with a new enterprise. There is the athlete who goes into training, the sportsman on a hunting or fishing trip, or the clerk who changes his job and goes into business for himself. They can rise before daybreak, going without food and sleep and enduring hardships of which they hardly deemed themselves capable. Once entered on the adventure, the old world they once knew has become a faint, forgotten, far-off thing and a new world of potentialities has opened before them. Where their powers were formerly divided, dissipated and easily fatigued, they feel them startlingly renewed, vigorous and untirable.
That is how the American people, for the most part unconsciously, have with prohibition put off the old by the superior attractions of a changed existence. America sober has achieved thingsINTEODUCTION
XXVlt
that America drunk never dreamed of, nor the wine-drinkers of the ancient world! Therefore eminent neurologists and psychologists should no longer confuse a successful act of attention with the narcotic paralysis produced by alcohol, and urge paralyzing the masses by self-dosage with the drug. To do so helps Prohibition to remain at its worst.PART I
STILL AT ITS WORSTCHAPTER I
IN A HIGH-POWERED AGE?
If the motor-car and high-powered enterprise are symbols of the forces that have displaced the saloon, how do automobile manufacturers and captains of industry regard Prohibition? How far do their views find scientific and legal confirmation?
Wet View
In recent correspondence with Pierre S. duPont, Chairman of the General Motors Corporation, Chairman of the Board of E. I. duPont de Nemours Company, and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, Irving Fisher wrote Mr. duPont:
May I make query on your very candid letter of 27th July, 1928, in which you state: “Clearly in any country that has not been reduced to a condition of absolute slavery of one man to another, the choice of conduct on the question of drink, in moderation, should be left open. I need hardly warn you that I do not grant this choice to those whose indulgence is such as to deprive others of their equally sacred rights.”
34 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
Prohibition Enforced, by duPonts
It was reported concerning tlie duPont de Nemours Company, in a hearing before the United States Senate Subcommittee of the Judiciary and as part of a confidential file submitted in evidence Nov. 20, 1918, belonging to Hugh H. Fox, Secretary of the U. S. Brewers’ Association, that the Advertising Manager of the company “explained how for years past the duPonts have absolutely prohibited the use of intoxicants by their employees, and, now with the rush of war orders, the prohibition ban has been drawn even closer.” Camillus Kessler, employed by Mr. Fox, reported to him: “After calling on several of the men in the offices in Wilmington, I took the ferry and went across the river to Penn’s Grove, where one of the largest of the duPont factories is located. There I talked with the Chief of Police, some of the men who work in the high explosives department and one of the guards. They all assured me that there was not a drink to be had in Penn’s Grove. The only bar in the town had been closed by the duPonts and if any workman wanted a drink of any kind he would have to go to Wilmington, or some other neighboring town.
“It is reported if a guard is seen taking a drink off duty, he is immediately discharged. If a workman comes to work with the slightest indication of liquor on his breath, he is not allowed to work. From all that I could see, Prohibition could not be more effectivelyME. duPONT IS QUESTIONED
5
enforced than it is in Penn’s Grove. I was informed by the officials and by men who had worked in the other factories of the company that the same conditions exist in all the du-Pont Company factories.”
May I ask whether the same Prohibition rule is in force in the factories of E. I. duPont de Nemours & Company under your Chairmanship of its Board of Directors? If so, is it not because, as you say in your letter to me, you “do not grant this choice to those whose indulgence is such as to deprive others of their equally sacred rights”?
If you would prohibit moderate drinking in the duPont de Nemours plant, would you also prohibit moderate drinking in all shops where accidents might occur through the use of modem high-powered machinery?
Would you prohibit moderate drinking by the drivers of motor cars?
Do you agree with Henry Ford in his statement that in this fast-driving and high-powered age even the moderate use of intoxicants has no proper place?
Or would you prohibit the use of intoxicants to the workingmen of this country and allow it to their employers?
These questions are asked in no spirit of unfriendliness, but to elicit your view as a responsible employer of labor and one who has had much to do with the placing of millions of motor cars on the highways of this country, of how indulgence in alcoholic liquors can be made compatible with the sacred rights of those whose lives may be endangered by6 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
the man who, as you phrase it in your letter to me, is “willing to submit” to “ills for the sake of some advantage, real or fancied, that will result from his drink.”
Mr. duPont replied:
Assents to Prohibition by Employers
I believe there is some confusion in regard to Prohibition by law and Prohibition by an employer. If certain work involving danger to life and property requires absolute sobriety, I cannot find fault with the employer refusing to employ a man who shows any sign of contact with alcohol when he reports for work, and, in fact, where the employer may be held liable for the action of the man employed, he may, if he choose, properly decline to employ a man who uses intoxicants at any time. This is no different from refusing to employ a man whose sight or hearing is in any way defective* for jobs requiring great keenness in those senses. It is purely a matter of choice of the man most suitable for the job. I do not know any rule of the duPont Company which requires total abstinence of any employee. I am quite certain that men are not permitted to go to work after having indulged in alcoholic drinks in a maimer to be detected by ordinary inspection, but I feel equally confident that there is no rule about drinking after work is done.
It is quite possible that there was an exception to the above statement during the war when strenuous efforts were being made inINCONSISTENT EMPLOYEES
7
every direction to get the best out of the men, whether they were willing or not. I shall look this up and let you know, but I do not consider the point of great moment.
There are many jobs open to-day to the man who drinks in moderation, especially those who confine their drinking to the hours of relaxation after work. I know a number of men who are very much in favor of Prohibition (for the workingman) who drink nothing themselves during business hours, - but who are pretty heavy consumers of alcoholic liquors after the day’s work is done. I am quite confident that they do themselves no physical harm nor do they impair their mentality; but I do not admire their inconsistency.
I employ about 150 to 300 men on my personal payroll. I have no rule whatever as to drinking and know of very few cases where the question has come up in any way. If a man should appear for work under the influence of liquor, or even smelling of it, I should call his attention to the fact that I had noticed the occurrence and request that there should be no recurrence. I am sure that many of the employees have liquor in their homes which they use in proper moderation ; in fact, a questionnaire sent out to them recently developed a reply of “No” from many in answer to the question: “Do you totally abstain from the use of alcoholic liquors, including wine and beer?”
Lest you should have failed to notice it, the result of this questionnaire sent to 300 em-8 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
ployees and their wives brought forth about 80 per cent replies within two weeks. The majority of them agreed that conditions under Prohibition were undesirable and advocated a change. A similar questionnaire sent to the voters of the State of Delaware brought forth replies from about half of those sent out, of which 40 per cent of the total, or 90 per cent., replied “Yes” to the following questions:
“1. Do you believe that much harm results from abuse of drink under the Prohibition laws that are in force in this country?
“2. Do you believe that alcoholic liquors, such as beer, wine, whisky and gin, may now be bought, illegally but freely, by those who wish to buy?
“3. Do you believe that the general disregard of Prohibition laws is leading to other lawlessness ?
“4. Do you think that change in existing Prohibition laws is needed?”
As to your question of whether I should prohibit in the duPont Company plants if it were my business to decide, I should not prohibit drinking, but I should not employ men who come to the plant under the influence of liquor, unless it were possible, as it frequently is with employees directly controlled, to encourage the man to confine his drinking to after working hours.
Question of Drink Before Driving
I employ a number of men for driving cars, as I do myself, and there is no prohibition on any of us to refrain from drinking. ButTHE DRINK BEFORE DRIVING
9
I should not take a drink before driving a motor car on a public road, and, to be exact, I should think it well to allow a couple of hours to elapse after taking a drink before driving, lest in case of accident I should be held accountable for something not my fault.
If safety on the road is a thing to be further safeguarded, it is much more necessary to examine people strictly for their capacity and ability to drive than to issue a Prohibition order against drinking. Many drivers are more dangerous sober than others are when drunk. The prohibition against drinking does not stop the drinking, but a refusal of license for those unfitted for driving, because of physical or mental disqualifications, would be very helpful in avoiding accidents.
To me it seems that many of these questions concerning drink fail to realize that there is a great difference between drinking in a way that interferes with a man’s capacity to steer a normal course and drinking, the result of which is not apparent by an ordinary test. The greater part of drinking must occur after working hours and when people are in a position where they are not called upon to execute their utmost endeavors. Drinking furnishes to many the same kind of relaxation that all expect to have in the evenings, playing games, reading light literature, attending theatrical performances, the movies, etc. During those hours we cease our effort toward constructive work. We are in a state of relaxation where we can drop off to sleep or do many other things that are10 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
exceedingly dangerous were we on an active and important job. I repeat that it is during these hours that many take a drink which helps their relaxation. I confess that it has no such effect upon me.
Those who oppose Prohibition have no objection whatever to strict disciplining of those who injure or jeopardize others by their excesses. Prohibitionists would find probably 90 per cent of the population ready to assist in this matter of protection, but they are unwilling to assist in a rule that condemns the innocent along with the guilty.
It is one of the ridiculous phases of the Prohibition movement that there is no attempt to prohibit a man’s drinking alcoholic beverages. If any wrong is done it is the drinker who does it, yet to-day he is the man who escapes. The man who makes, the man who sells, the man who transports, and at times the man who possesses liquor, are all guilty under the law; but, the man who drinks, the very one that is at fault, is allowed to go Scott-free, unless his delinquencies actually jeopardize somebody. Is this not the most monumental inconsistency?
Mr. duPont replied to a further suggestion from Irving Fisher, as follows:
This is in reply to your letter of September 1, (1928), suggesting the difficulty or impossibility of discriminating between the temperate and the intemperate, therefore recommending a blanket prohibition which takesDEVISE LAWS THAT DO GOOD
11
care of the latter and “does not really harm the former.” In these few quoted words is summed up the history of bad government from time immemorial. The Romans undoubtedly thought that it did not harm Christians to try to make them Pagans. The early Catholics had the same opinion concerning the conversion of Protestants to Catholicism. Doubtless King George III and his parliament thought that the American Taxes did not really harm the people of the colonies. The slaveholders thought that the slaves were not only unharmed but were better off as slaves than as free men. Some of them still think so. Thousands of instances might be cited. The whole principle of good government is to devise laws that do good, not those that simply avoid doing harm in the opinion of the dictator. The whole Prohibition question comes from the wrong point of view on this one point.
Mr. Bashob Notes Lack of Respect for Law
Irenee duPont, President of the duPont Company, stands shoulder to shoulder with his brother in opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment and its supporting laws. John J. Raskob, Vice President and Chairman of the Finance Committee of the same company and a Director of General Motors, resigned as Chairman of the Finance Committee of General Motors in order to manage the campaign for the Presidency of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, Mr. Raskob, like12 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the brothers duPont, bases his opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment on the plea of personal liberty.
He says:
I am not a drinking man (this does not mean I never take a drink), am a director in corporations employing over three hundred thousand workmen and have a family of twelve children ranging in ages from five to twenty-one years. The thing that is giving me the greatest concern in connection with the rearing of these children and the future of our country is the fact that our citizens seem to be developing a thorough lack of respect for our laws and institutions, and there seems to be a growing feeling that nothing is wrong in life except getting caught.
A large number of people feel that a majority in this country have no more right to curtail their freedom with respect to drinking beer, wines or even spirits than they have to deny religious worship. These people feel they do no wrong in the eyes of God when they buy and consume beer, wines and liquors in spite of the law. They feel that those who have the money to pay for such beverages and have them analyzed can drink without risk of health, while those who cannot do so must either do without or take great risks of being poisoned. It is for this reason that the great mass of our workmen and poor people feel that Prohibition does not prohibit but isCHILDREN OBSERVE THEIR ELDERS 13
a scheme to deny them something which their more fortunate brothers with money can have almost at will. Is it any wonder they should rebel?
My experience is that children like to be with older folks, are quick, alert and particularly keen on listening to what their elders say and do. What impressions are registering on the minds of my sons and daughters when they see thoroughly reputable and successful men and women drinking, talking about their bootleggers, the good “stuff” they get, expressing contempt for the Volstead law, etc.? At our home we can and do teach temperance in all things; none of our children drink intoxicants, but what ideas are forming in their young and fertile brains with respect to law and order? They observe people in every walk of life merrily violating foolish blue laws, foolish speed laws, etc., that every sensible citizen knows are made to be broken and not enforced. The farmers in Connecticut and Delaware legislatures were strong enough to have laws passed prohibiting Daylight Saving Time in those States. They would not tolerate the desire of city folks to have an hour more of daylight in which to play in the summertime. The result is that Yale University in Connecticut and the people of the City of Wilmington in Delaware rebel, pay no attention whatever to the law, and merely all agree to set their watches back an hour at 2:00 a. m. on a certain Sunday in April and return to Standard Time in October. This is another illustration of the14 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
failure of Prohibition born of intolerance and lack of respect for liberty and freedom.
The attitude of Messrs. Raskob and duPont is typical of that assumed by industrial leaders who oppose Prohibition.
Dby View
In yet another communication to Pierre S. duPont, Irving Fisher summed up the Dry comment on the attitude of the maker of automobiles and high explosives, as follows:
Speaking with the responsibility of a large employer and of one whose business it is to encourage the driving of automobiles on crowded highways, are you quite sure you have scientific backing when you say, “To be exact, I should think it well to allow a couple of hours to elapse after taking a drink before driving, lest in case of accident I should be held accountable for something not my fault”?
Menace of the Moderate Drinker
These words are quite different from those used by Dr. Francis G-. Benedict, after most exhaustive tests of the effects of alcohol in the Nutrition Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Dr. Benedict remarks (“Alcohol and Human Physiology,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Yol. 17, No. 4, page 423 ff.):15
MODEBATE USEE, KEEP OFF!
Inflexible science says: “Moderate user, keep off! for at least four hours after a dose of alcohol formerly considered ‘permissible,’ you, as a motor vehicle operator, may well be considered a ‘menace to society.’ ”
When it is pleaded that the greater part of drinking must occur after working hours, it must be noted, also, that the greater part of driving for pleasure occurs after working hours. In view of the fact that there are between twenty-three and twenty-four million motor cars on our highways is not the ease, then, as regards the public policy of Prohibi-tion, on all fours with the private policy of Prohibition in the duPont and other plants of the country, which forbids the use of intoxicants by men who are engaged in dangerous occupations ?
What other public policy than that of Prohibition, at least of the traffic in intoxicants, is practicable in circumstances where a “moderate” drink during four hours after it has been taken may result in a fatal collision?
The argument on the score of personal liberty implies, it is true, personal liberty to drink. You point out the seeming inconsistency of the Eighteenth Amendment and its supporting laws in not depriving drinkers of this liberty while they do prohibit the manufacture and traffic in liquors. Personally I should have favored the prohibition only of the public traffic, reserving the privilege of citizens to brew and drink intoxicants privately in their homes, if they so elect. But I think you will agree with me that the Fed-16 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
eral Supreme Court speaks with, better authority than either of us can claim when it says, in the case of Samuel v. McCurdy (267 U. S., 188,197) :
“The ultimate legislative object of Prohibition is to prevent the drinking of intoxicating liquor by any one because of the demoralizing effect of drunkenness upon society. The State has the power to subject those members of society who might indulge in the use of such liquor without injury to themselves to a deprivation of access to liquor in order to remove temptation from those whom its use would demoralize, and to avoid the abuses which follow in its train.”
It will be difficult for most readers to follow you when you say that such statements, made by the most profound interpreters of our democratic government, ‘ ‘ sum up the history of bad government from time immemorial. ’ ’ In Duncan Townsite Company v. Lane (245 U. S., 307), the United States Supreme Court also says:
“It must now be regarded as settled that, on account of their well-known noxious qualities and the extraordinary evils shown by experience commonly to be consequent upon their use, a State has power absolutely to prohibit manufacture, gift, purchase, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within its borders without violating the guarantee of •the Fourteenth Amendment .	. . And
considering the notorious difficulties always attendant upon efforts to suppress traffic in liquors, we are unable to say that the chal-ENFORCEMENT AGAINST THE DRINKER 17
lenged inhibition of their possession was arbitrary and unreasonable or without proper relations to the legitimate legislative purpose.”
Not Practicable to Prohibit Drinking
As to the practicability of enforcing Prohibition against the drinker, who, as you justly observe, is the very one at fault, Mr. Ernest H. Cherrington states the case (Current History, August, 1928) as follows:
“Many States had and still have laws which forbid drinking intoxicating liquor in public places. Laws forbidding such drinking in private places might face constitutional obstacles, unless such offenses were made felonies. It would have been possible to forbid all drinking by law, as also to legalize confiscation of all liquor in this country, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, but since the enemies of this national policy have shown themselves prepared to combat it by invoking every possible technicality and law’s delay, it seemed unnecessary to take this step inasmuch as, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as of many lesser courts, the end sought—the abolition of the drinking of intoxicants—could more readily be obtained by the methods that were taken.”
In the face of this reasoning the seeming inconsistency of the National Prohibition Laws tends to disappear. And Mr. Cherrington speaks with the scientific and legal back-18 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
ing which opponents of Prohibition notably lack when he adds:
“Neither behind the wheel of the chauffeur, at the throttle of the locomotive, the stick of the aviator or the lathe of the machinist, nor anywhere else in our crowded American life, is there a place for the man whose nerves are shaken by any indulgence in alcoholic drinks. The Eighteenth Amendment was intended to outlaw absolutely all such beverages, ”
The plea of personal liberty to drink in terms acknowledges this intent when it opposes the law. It clashes with the private prohibition of drinking imposed by employers of labor, and it clashes with the policy of National Prohibition which is imposed by the public for identical reasons. It is this identity of public and private policy that leads me to wonder why you, who believe in the strict disciplining of those whose acts injure or jeopardize the safety of others, assent to such disciplining by means of private prohibition in the industries of the country, and dissent from it when applied, among other cogent reasons, for the sake of public safety on the public highways.
Motor Car Heads Support Prohibition
Many heads of the automobile industry, differing with Messrs. duPont and Easkob, confirm by their testimony the views expressed above. Henry Ford, for example, said in an interview at Sudbury, Mass., during August, 1928 :NO CHANCE FOR MODIFICATION
19
If the law were changed, we’d have to shut down our plants. Everything in the United States is keyed up to a new pace which started with Prohibition. The speed at which we run our motor cars, operate our intricate machinery, and generally live, would be impossible with liquor. No, there is no chance even of modification.
In like vein, E. H. Scott, President of the Eeo Motor Car Company, declares his conviction that “the return of public drinking-places would make the motor car a menace on the highways and would stop the sale, to a large extent, of the cheaper cars, as the money would be spent over the bar.”
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., President of the General Motors Corporation, expressed his dissent from the views of Messrs. duPont and Easkob when he announced September 3,1928, his support of Herbert Hoover for President, concluding his reasons as follows:
Having been intimately connected with industrial problems for many years, I am thoroughly convinced that Prohibition has increased our national efficiency, has added to the purchasing power of the people and given us an advantage in our competition for foreign trade.
At the same time, I recognize that conditions respecting the observance of the law are far from satisfactory and time may prove the20 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
necessity for some adjustments. If so, I am for having those adjustments brought about by an executive in sympathy with the economic benefits that the closest possible adherence to the Prohibition idea is sure to bring about.
Following Mr. Sloan’s statement, W. 0. Durant, President of Durant Motors, Inc., cabled from Europe his offer of a prize of $25,000 for the best and most practicable plan to make the Eighteenth Amendment effective, saying:
Big business leaders who have the largest stake in law observance publicly and privately violate this law and countenance its violation by others. Instead of using their wealth and influence to create public opinion demanding law enforcement, our business men of character and position are the chief support of the master criminal class, the bootlegger.
It is not surprising that the flagrant example of lawlessness on the part of the men highest in their communities has undermined respect for law in their children, their servants, their employees and all classes of citizens, including public officials and judges.
When thinking men generally come to realize that the responsibility is up to them to take the initiative in law observance, then, and not until then, will the Eighteenth Amendment be given fair trial.
Until that time there should be no thoughtSALOON COMPETITOE OF MOTOE CAE 21
of writing this provision out of the Constitution.
It is my belief that a majority of our people do not want the Eighteenth Amendment abandoned. Legislatures of forty-six of the Forty-eight States voted it into the Federal Constitution because there was need of it. The people want it enforced and obeyed.
In order to give expression to the soundest thought in the country on the subject, I offer a prize of $25,000 for the best and most practicable plan to make the Eighteenth Amendment effective.
No doubt Mr. Easkob and the brothers duPont represent a minority of sentiment against Prohibition among heads of American business. This is certainly the case in the great industry in which they rank as leaders. After exhaustive inquiry, Professor Herman Feldman of Dartmouth College testifies in his book, “Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects”:
In the automobile trade itself, the saloon is regarded as a competitor of the car. Some automobile manufacturers seem to be opposed to its return on that score alone. While some do not credit Prohibition with being a factor in its expansion, the industry as a whole does ; and the makers of the more moderate priced cars are particularly strong on this issue.
The antagonism of the Ford Motor Company to a return of the saloon is, of course,22 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
known. The Sales department of the Willys-Overland Company believes that the abolition of the saloons has resulted in an increased market for passenger cars. Another concern which prefers that we do not use its name, makes a strong argument of the same point and ends with the succinct assertion that: “Gasoline and booze don’t mix.” The Distribution Manager of the Franklin Automobile Company, explains : ‘ ‘ The sale of a car like the Franklin is influenced by the demand for used cars. In other words, the bigger the market for used Franklins, the bigger the market for new Franklins. In this respect also Prohibition has, we believe, helped to provide the funds with which the purchases are made.” And so on it goes among most of the makes widely sold.
New Diversions Supplant the Saloon
Among the other means of public diversion that have supplanted the saloon, Professor Feldman quotes the Association of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the organization of the largest concerns, as stating:
Since the abolition of saloons the moving picture theatre has become the social center and to a surprising extent the recreation of those who before frequented drinking establishments.
Dr. Feldman also speaks of “Considerable testimony from industrial insurance agents, employ-POPULATION" HAS BECOME MOBILE 23
ers, and the radio industry itself. The latter,” he continues, “regards the abolition of the saloon as a factor in bringing the radio into homes where it might not have come so soon otherwise. One manufacturer explains: ‘In my own experience, various chauffeurs whom I have employed have shown an eagerness to go to their homes to listen in to some particular program which was to be on that evening; whereas, heretofore, it appeared to me that they have considered their homes more or less places to get food and shelter.’ ”
It is manifest, therefore, that the rapid changes that have taken place in the means of relaxation in the life of the masses in America have effectually disposed of the argument that they must stupefy themselves with alcohol in order to gain a respite from their workaday cares. Furthermore, the fact that the whole population has become mobile, multiplying and making constant the dangers of the highways, has made literally true the saying that a man who drinks a glass of beer is one glass of beer drunk. A committee of the British Medical Association reports:
The word “drunk” should always be taken to mean that the person concerned is so much under the influence of alcohol as to have lost control of his faculties to such an extent as to render him unable to execute safely the occupation in which he is engaged at the material time.24 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
The Nutrition Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has spoken on this point with respect to a moderate-drinking motor car driver during the four hours following his drink. Bobbins Stoeckel, Commissioner of Motor Vehicles of Connecticut, speaks from his experience:
A really drunken driver is usually not dangerous, because he is so easily and quickly detected, or incapacitated, as being found asleep in his car at the curb. The really dangerous driver is the man who has had one or two drinks only, who still thinks he is in possession of his faculties but his judgment has been slightly impaired. On the public highways moderate drinking is more dangerous than immoderate, and on this account the authorities in order to protect the public safety must reckon with the effects of moderate drinking.
On the side of constitutional right, therefore, as decided by the highest tribunal in America, on the side of scientific investigation of the effects of moderate drinking on the average human individual, and on the side of experience in promoting safety from accidents on the highways and in the factories of the nation, the weight of evidence is altogether in favor of Prohibition.CHAPTER II
IN ITS EFFECTS ON YOUTH?
Wet View
In. “Prohibition at Its Worst,” under the chapter heading “New Drinkers Fall Off,” appears the question:	“But what about the first
convictions of offenders—mostly young offenders —during the years of wartime restrictions and national Prohibition?” The book answers: “In New York, which many account the wettest city in the United States, with a population greater than that of several States, computations, made for me, from data of the Fingerprint Bureau, New York City Magistrate’s Court, show a steady and pronounced decrease of first offenders (as indicated by convictions for drunkenness for the first time), from 24 per 10,000 population for the year 1914, to only 6 per 10,000 population for the year 1925!”
Lessened First Convictions in Pre-Prohibition
New York
Again in its chart of arrests for drunkenness in New York City, “Prohibition at Its Worst” points to the improvement since 1916. But the book takes no notice, either in this chart or in its
2526 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
chart of convictions of first offenders, of the trend of arrests and convictions for drunkenness, respectively, as exhibited in its own graphs and tables.
The pronounced decrease of first offenders in New York City—much greater than the decrease in total convictions for drunkenness—was already taking place during the years preceding wartime restrictions and national Prohibition of the liquor traffic.
Moreover, the only check in the downward trend of first convictions took place during the years of National Prohibition beginning with 1920. So that if the figures prove anything, they would seem to prove that the effect of the Prohibition law on youth in New York City was to increase the totals of arrests and convictions for drunkenness of first and other offenders.
These figures tend to establish the view expressed in the report of the Federal Council of Churches in 1925, which said: “There is no apparent justification for the common assumption that New York is ‘wetter’ than most other cities. In fact, there is reason to think that the reverse is true.”
The chart of Arrests for Drunkenness in New York City published by the Moderation League, Inc., of New York, in its “National Survey of Conditions Under Prohibition, 1927,” j shows a remarkable and very uniform decline in totalFEWER DRUNKEN CASES IN NEW YORK 27
arrests for drunkenness since 1903, when they numbered 53,396, until 1919, when the low point of 6,855 was reached. This low point was hardly more than one-eighth of the level of 1903. Yet saloons were open and legal in New York City until July 1, 1919, when they were closed by the Federal Law. This astonishing decrease in arrests for drunkenness took place under the legal saloon. But it is true that the number of arrests for drunkenness per capita in New York City nowadays is very much less than in the other large cities of the nation.
Arrests of Minors in Washington, D. C.
While in other cities there is a paucity of authoritative statistics on the subject of drunkenness among the young, apparently the largest increase has taken place among those from 15 to 25 years. Juvenile court records are of little value because they deal with the very young who have not yet come into much spending money and who have not developed enough initiative to forage for liquor. The Police Department of Washington, D. C., however, has classified its arrests for drunkenness by ages, and its figures are illuminating. Saloons were officially closed in Washington as a war measure near the end of 1917. Arrests of minors (under 21) for drunkenness average 46.7 a year for the eight saloon years, 1910-1917. The number was 36 in 1917. In 191828 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOKST
and 1919, there was a considerable rise, followed in 1920, the first year of constitutional Prohibition, by a drop, presumably due to a temporary scarcity of alcoholic beverages. In 1921, however, there was a big rise which wiped out the 1920 drop. The increase since then has been almost constant, with the result that by 1926 the number of minors arrested for drunkenness had reached 340. Arrests of persons of all ages for drunkenness rose in 1926 not nearly so high above the pre-Prohibition level, thus demonstrating that, relatively as well as absolutely, arrests for drunkenness among minors in Washington increased enormously.
The Cincinnati Tribune of February 24, 1925, reports: “Police records in nearly every large city in the country show that the average age of criminals and of all delinquents is considerably lower than it was five years ago. . . . The Commercial Tribune has obtained interviews on the subject from several of the judges of the local courts and the symposium of views reveals some very interesting things. Nearly all of those interviewed expressed the belief that improper discipline in the home, entire lack of discipline or general neglect on the part of parents to safeguard the morals of children is at the root of the greater part of the juvenile delinquencies. The next cause cited by several of the judges is liquor, and a general disregard of the Prohibition law by pa-DEMORALIZATION OF THE YOUNG
29
rents, which, in the view of some of the judges, encourages a disregard of all law by younger persons.”
Testimony of Salvation Army Officers
Colonel William L. Barker, head of Northern Division, Salvation Army, and organizer of the Salvation Army Unit in France during the World War, testifies that Prohibition is demoralizing boys and girls. In the St. Cloud, Minn., Daily Times, February 9, 1925, Colonel Barker said: “Prohibition has diverted the energies of the Salvation Army from the drunkard in the gutter to the boys and girls in their teens. The work of the Army has completely changed in the past five years since the dry era came into being, and Prohibition has so materially affected society that we have girls in our rescue homes who are 14 and 15 years old, while 10 years ago the youngest was in the early twenties.”
And Colonel Margaret Bovil, Salvation Army, is quoted by the Association against the Prohibition Amendment, as stating: “Forty-two per cent of unmarried mothers cared for in the last two years in fifteen Salvation Army homes in the Eastern territory were school girls of an average age of sixteen. . .
“In spite of reforms, such as doing away with red light districts, the Salvation Army now has in this territory twice the number of maternity30 PROHIBITION" STILL AT ITS WORST
homes it operated in those lurid days of the past and they are filled to capacity—by whom? Not by professionals, but by school children, many of whom have been obliged to leave their desks in high or elementary grades to go direct to our institutions. .	.	.
“The cities covered in the survey and the percentage of girls whose age averages sixteen in the Salvation Army maternity home of each of these cities follow:
“Philadelphia, 75 per cent; Jersey City, 60 per cent; Pittsburgh, 50 per cent; Buffalo, 40 per cent; Cincinnati (white), 70 per cent; Cincinnati (Negro) 60 per cent; Birmingham, 25 per cent; Boston, 13 per cent; Cleveland (white), 22 per cent; Cleveland (Negro), 60 per cent; Louisville, 20 per cent; Boanoke, 50 per cent; Wilmington, 35 per cent; New York City, 20 per cent; Richmond, 40 per cent.”
The New York Committee of Fourteen, an antivice agency of exceptional efficiency, states in its last annual report that the Volstead Law has been responsible for an increase in commercial vice, and that immorality thrives in night clubs and speakeasies and cabarets, because the conditions in those establishments are more inviting than they were in the old saloons.
It would appear, therefore, that under the conditions of lax enforcement under the Volstead act and in many States under concurrent State laws,ALCOHOLIC EECOED OF NEW YOEK CITY 31
drinking and immorality among youth, are not diminishing, but increasing.
Dry View	‘
In the alcoholic record of New York City there is nothing to warrant the widely heralded belief that Prohibition has debauched American youth. On the contrary, first convictions for drunkenness in that city, in which youth have a principal share, have diminished more rapidly, even, than the total yearly convictions for drunkenness. The book “Prohibition at Its Worst” correctly noted this fact; it failed to note the downward trend of arrests for drunkenness in the pre-Prohibition era subsequent to 1903, and the fact that second
offenders and other “repeaters” may have been charged with other offenses than drunkenness. This fact, however, only serves to strengthen the argument of the book, that in wet New York both first and repeater convictions declined.
Wet in Sentiment, Dry in Practice
This shows that Prohibition was rather the accompaniment of increasing sobriety in New York City than its underlying cause. Avowedly wet, composed largely of immigrants and their children reared in the Old World tradition of alcohol, by its attractions and its concentrated pursuits ; by its very dangers of traffic, making sobriety a safety requisite in an age of high-pow-32 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
ered machinery, New York City is more subject to those twentieth century influences that brought about Prohibition than the inland States that have sustained their adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Yet because the whole country is affected by these influences, New York is typical of the nation. It is nearly twelve times the size of Washington, D. C. In fact, New York City equals the combined populations of Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City, Mo., Topeka, Des Moines, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Spokane, Cincinnati, Louisville, Ky., Richmond, Youngstown, Saginaw, St. Joseph, San Antonio, Memphis, Little Rock, and Indianapolis. If the populations of Metropolitan New York be included, to equal it we might add to these twenty cities the combined populations of Cleveland, St. Louis, and Philadelphia—in all a population exceeding that of sixteen States and the District of Columbia. Yet here, in the nation’s most populous center of disrespect for the Prohibition law, whose legislators helped tear the State’s enforcement law from the statute books, the youth are far from demoralized.
For here the youthful rate of first convictions for drunkenness, as revised from the records of the Fingerprint Bureau of the City Magistrates Court, has fallen from 35.3 per 10,000 of population in 1914, to 8.9 in 1919, and, after a temporaryARRESTS OF MINORS IN WASHINGTON 33
rise to 13.0 in 1922, to the lowest point yet reached, 7.8 per 10,000 of population, in 1927!
It was measurably of New York’s youth, then, that the late Wayne B. Wheeler said in his address before the Economic Club of New York, November 30, 1926:
The large and overwhelming majority of the American people are obeying this law to-day. Bight here in New York City you have millions who are obeying this law, and the manifest benefits of Prohibition in New York City to-day are evidenced more by your people who are obeying the law than by those who are having it enforced against them.
As for increased arrests of minors in Washington, D. C., this is at least in part due to a change in legal action. For the Superintendent of Police in Washington states:	“Prior to July 1,
1923, it was not an offense to be intoxicated in the District of Columbia.” But the police force of Washington is under Federal influence and appointment. No doubt the putting of the Prohibition unit under Civil Service rules will bear fruit in better local enforcement in the nation’s capital.
Fewer Drunken Fathers and Criminal Youth
The social testimony of debauchery concerns youth of school and college age. Countering the stories of increase in youthful crime, the Chil-34 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
dren’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor finds (“Alcoholism Among Parents of Juvenile Delinquents,” The Social Service Review, September, 1927) :
The trend of alcoholism among the fathers of the 2,378 children included in this study, the report says, is “similar to that which appears in families known to the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Prior to national Prohibition intemperance was present in the homes of 47.7 per cent of the families known to this society; in 1921 the percentage had dropped to 16.8. In 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1925, the percentages of families in which intemperance was a factor were 20.2, 23.2, 21.9, and 18.9 respectively. Similarly, figures for arrests for drunkenness in Boston show that the number of persons arrested for this reason, in each of the last six years, was much less than the number prior to 1919, although since 1921 the number has been greater than it was in 1920, the year immediately following Prohibition.”
If drunken fathers are fewer, so, also, are delinquent children and criminal youth. In its figures showing the rates of juvenile delinquency in fourteen cities of the United States, the Federal Children’s Bureau reported March 20, 1926, a “decline in delinquent children committed to institutions, if growth in population is taken into consideration.”
Concerning the anti-prohibitionist and otherYOUTH HAVE BECOME LESS CRIMINAL 35
reports that the prison population is increasing at the younger ages, the Bureau says :
Contrary to opinions which have been expressed there seems to have been no marked decrease in age of commitment. On the contrary, only 9.4 per cent of the commitments in 1923 were of persons between the ages of 18 and 20 years, as compared with 9.8 per cent in 1904, and with percentages of 11.8 and 12.1 based on persons present in 1880 and 1890, respectively. There has been no increase since 1904, in the percentages of persons between the ages of 21 and 24 years, and the percentages for this age are lower for recent years than for the years 1880 and 1890. The same may be said of the age group 25 to 34. Persons between the ages of 35 and 44 are contributing a slightly larger percentage of the total commitments at present as compared with earlier years.
Thus the youth of the land are cleared of the charge of increased criminality since national Prohibition.
Drink Not a Problem in High Schools
At the request of Irving Fisher, a questionnaire was sent during 1928 by Ralph H. White to high school principals throughout the wet State of Connecticut; 104 copies were mailed, 83 were returned. All of the chief high schools in the State replied. Seventy-five declared that drink was not a problem in the discipline of the school, while five36 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
were indefinite and eight returned no answer. Fifty-six declared that it was not a problem in the social life of the school, five said it was, eight-teen were indefinite, and nine failed to reply.
Similarly, questionnaires sent to about 100 city school superintendents and 100 college Presidents by the Anti-Saloon League and reported June 14, 1927, elicited replies from most of the larger colleges and universities that drinking among the student bodies had “greatly diminished,” while Princeton and the University of Wisconsin were the only large universities reporting any appreciable amount of drinking. Most of the high school superintendents reported little or no drinking or a decline in drinking among their students. The survey incorporated high school and university reports from cities scattered over the country.
Outside the schools the testimony of the Salvation Army, with exceptions noted on the wet side of this chapter, is preponderantly that there is far less drinking among youth than before national Prohibition. “None of the young men are drunkards,” Evangeline Booth says in the pamphlet “Some Have Stopped Drinking,” concerning those who apply for relief; “it is the old fellows who still drink. Prohibition did not cure their appetite for alcohol.”
Of the maternity homes of the Army, she says, “It is sometimes argued on country-club porches,IN THE SALVATION AEMY HOMES
37
in the magnificent hotel lounges and in drawing rooms that women are drinking more than they did in former days. I do not think so. The Salvation Army in its Eastern division operates ten rescue homes for women—chiefly unmarried mothers—in New York, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo and Boston, with a total capacity of 500.
“Before Prohibition, in each of those homes we were always trying to straighten out half a dozen or more drink cases, and if you can imagine anything more tragic than a newly born baby lying in the arms of a drink-soaked mother your imagination outstrips mine. To-day, in all our rescue homes, there are no more than half a dozen inmates whose situations are complicated by an addiction to beer or wine or whiskey.”
The testimony concerning youthful drinking in the 193 reports of social settlements on which Martha Bensley Bruere bases her book, “Does Prohibition Work?” (1927) is not alarmist. Of the young Mrs. Bruere says, in summing up, that their drinking “is an adventure, a gesture of daring, a sign of revolt, an illusion of power, part of the game they call life; and so far not habit forming nor a serious problem.” (Page 282.) That is likewise the testimony of college heads.
Elders, Not Youth, to Blame When they drink, Harold Bell Wright says38 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
(“They Are Not!” American Magazine, June, 1928) they imitate their elders:
This younger generation has nothing against Volstead. Why should they have? They are not confirmed old topers who must have their drink, though they go down into the shadow of death to get it. This rebellion against Prohibition is a rebellion of our generation—the generation of parents of these young people. We oldsters incited this revolt. We finance it. We manage it. We head the processions. We do the shouting. . .	. In their clear-eyed contemplation of
life, in their bold and consistent discussions of hitherto forbidden topics, in their matter-of-fact reasoning on vital subjects, in their intolerance of sham, in their bold refusal to keep anything dark, and in their refusal to be led without reason by the traditions of their parents, this “rebellious” generation has all the qualities which are needed to redeem civilization from the utter ruin toward which our generation is driving it.
Mr. Wright touches more nearly the cause both of Prohibition and of the comparative sobriety of youth when he speaks of automobiles, airships, radio, the world war, and a hundred other wonders which have happened and are happening:
I am saying to my boy friends (looking over my glasses, and shaking my wise old head), “I envy you youngsters; the world is just swinging into the most interesting, excit-ADVANTAGES SEIZED FROM WAR
39
ing, and critical period of its history, and you lads have happened along in the very nick of time to land slap in the middle of it all. The changes you will make! The problems you will solve! The wars you will fight! The miracles you will work! We old fellows are out of it. We are going to die off pretty soon, and leave all the fun for you!”
Although war is deplorable, nevertheless it was the war and its exploits that broke the monotony of life for the young. It gave a fresh impetus to science and the arts. In upsetting the old-world monarchies it placed them in tutelage to the greatest of the democracies.
In the thousand special pursuits that have lifted us to this foremost place among nations the youth of America have cut loose from the Old World tradition of drink. They refuse to give ear to the elders who still insist that the lot of the masses is miserable, monotonous, care-ridden; that their only recourse is to have their thrilling nerve centers paralyzed and to sink into alcoholic lethargy.CHAPTER III
IN THE ATTITUDE OF PHYSICIANS?
While eminent medical experts of the type of Dr. Charles L. Dana of New York and Professor E. H. Starling of London advocate alcoholic selfdosage by the masses for the sake of its paralyzing effect on the higher nervous centers, thus causing them to forget their cares and miseries, a struggle is going on within the medical profession as to whether it is wise to prescribe alcohol at all. Among those that hold to the traditional view that alcohol is a medicine, opposition has developed to the Yolstead regulation forbidding the prescription of malt liquors and limiting spirituous liquors of beverage quality to one pint per patient within a period of ten days. The appeals of these physicians, led by Dr. Samuel W. Lambert of New York, have been carried to the Federal Supreme Court, which in the case of malt alcohol prescriptions unanimously, and by a division of five to four, in the case of medicinal alcoholic spirits, sustains the Volstead act.
Wet View
In the book “Prohibition at Its Worst,” attention is called to the resolution adopted in June,
40VIEWS OE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASS’N 41
1917, by the American Medical Association, in which that body declared its opposition to the use of alcohol as a beverage, and favored discouragement of the use of alcohol as a curative agent. But the book omits to mention the Association’s refusal, in 1921, to reaffirm the judgment of 1917, and further resolutions in 1922, 1924, and 1925, all of which opposed the 1917 resolution. The resolution adopted by the Council of the Association in 1922, declared that it was “unwise to attempt to determine most scientific questions by resolution or by vote, ’ ’ and recommended that the House “take no action at this time on the question of the therapeutic value of alcohol.”
Physicians Equally Divided on Alcohol as
Medicine
The Journal of the American Medical Association, in order to secure the views of a representative portion of the medical profession in America regarding the effect of alcohol in certain diseases, addressed an identical questionnaire to 53,900, or more than one third of the physicians of the United States. Of these, 43,900 were selected by taking every other name on the mailing list of the Journal. The 10,000 physicians who were neither members of the American Medical Association nor subscribers to the Journal were selected in a similar way from the National Medical Directory. Thirty-one thousand one hundred fifteen replies42 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
were received, or 58 per cent of the total number sent out. The replies were summarized in a report published in the Journal, part of which follows:
1.	Physicians of the United States are almost equally divided on the question as to whether whiskey is a necessary therapeutic agent in the practice of medicine; about 26 per cent consider beer necessary; about 22 per cent consider wine necessary.
2.	More physicians of cities over 50,000 in population consider alcoholic beverages necessary than do those in smaller cities and in rural communities.
3.	The large majority of physicians who consider whiskey necessary believe it valuable in pneumonia, influenza and other acute infectious diseases.
4.	A considerable proportion of those who consider whiskey of value utilize it in the treatment of diseases incident to old age and general debility, in convalescence, diabetes, heart failure and shock.
5.	26 per cent of the physicians who answered the questionnaire consider beer necessary or useful therapeutically, especially in lactation, convalescence, old age, and for the treatment of debility, dyspepsia and anemia.
6.	22 per cent consider wine necessary and useful, chiefly in the same conditions as beer, but also as a substitute for whiskey.
7.	About one-fourth of the physicians stated that they had seen instances of un-PHYSICIAN OF DISTINCTION SUES
43
necessary suffering or death which they attributed to the enforcement of Prohibition laws, including cases due to whiskey of illicit manufacture or poor quality.
States Had Determined Question In his dissenting opinion in the case of Samuel W. Lambert vs. Edward C. Yellowley, et al., Mr. Justice Sutherland said, with three other Justices of the Federal Supreme Court concurring:
Plainly, Congress in submitting the Eighteenth Amendment, and the several States in ratifying it, meant to leave the question of the prohibition of intoxicating liquors for other than beverage purposes to the determination of the States, where it had always been. ...
The suit was brought by a physician of distinction, and, as the court below said, “of wide and unusual experience in the practice of medicine.” He alleges that it is his opinion, based on experience, observation and medical study, that the use of spirituous liquors as medicine is, in certain cases, necessary in order to afford relief from known ailments ; and that in the use of such liquors as medicine it is, in certain cases, including some now under his own observation and subject to his professional advice, necessary, in order to afford relief, that more than one pint of such liquor in ten days should be used internally and, in certain cases necessary that it should be used without delay, notwithstanding that within a preceding period of44 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOKST
less than ten days one pint of such liquor has already been used. He further alleges that in prescribing drugs and medicines the determination of the quantity involves a consideration of the physical condition of the patient and their probable effect in each specific case.
Majority Opinion of Court Is Challenged
In addition to these allegations, we have the fact that Congress, acting upon a report of one of its committees made after exhaustive hearings, declared by statute that the prescription of malt liquors should be prohibited and the prescription of spirituous and vinous liquors should be permitted.
Justifying such legislation the committee had reported that the overwhelming evidence was to the effect that malt liquors (not also spirituous and vinous liquors) had no substantial medicinal value. It is now said by the majority, at one point, that the preponderating opinion of practicing physicians is against the use of all three, and, at another point, that only a minor fraction hold the other view. I am quite unable to assent to these generalizations. On the contrary, the impossibility of determining, from anything now before this court, what is the preponderating opinion upon the subject, is very clear. An examination of the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, cited as authority for the foregoing statements, shows that the inquiry there was directed to the question of the medical value of malt liquors and thatCHALLENGE BY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION 45
the question of the medical value of the other liquors was not under consideration.
The hearings contain a few casual references to the other liquors ; but I feel justified in saying that they reflect no light upon the state of medical opinion as to the value of such liquors as medicines. It is stated in the brief for the appellees that a questionnaire, sent out to one-third of the physicians of the United States, brought a reply from enough to make 21.5 per cent of the whole number of physicians in the country, and that a little more than one-half of those replying voted “Yes” on the use of whiskey as a therapeutic agency, some of them, however, taking exception to the word “necessary,” saying that no drugs were absolutely necessary.
The American Medical Association, whose resolution of 1917 is referred to, have filed in this case a brief as amicus curiae, challenging the conclusion which is drawn from that resolution and vigorously attacking the act now under review as arbitrary and unreasonable. In 1924 the House of Delegates of the Association adopted a resolution expressing its disapproval of those portions of the act “which interfere with the proper relation between the physician and his patient in prescribing alcohol medicinally.” It seems plain, therefore, that the most that can be said is that the question is of a highly controversial character; and, since it reasonably cannot be doubted’ that it is a fairly debatable one, the legislative finding, necessarily implicit in the act, that vinous and spirituous46 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
liquors are of medicinal value, must be accepted here.
Day View
Outlived customs and prescriptions die hard. Two or three generations ago it was the universal custom of physicians to prescribe alcohol in many diseases, including fevers and heart disease, on the theory that it possessed a stimulating action. Now it is the authoritative finding that alcohol never acts as a stimulant, and always as a depressant. Because of this fact most leaders of the medical profession severely restrict or altogether disuse alcohol in their practice. Such leaders are Charles H. Mayo and C. A. L. Reed, formerly Presidents of the American Medical Association, Dr. John B. Murphy of Chicago, Major Frank Billings, M.D., dean of the Rush Medical College of Chicago, and Dean David L. Edsall of the Harvard Medical faculty, and George Blumer formerly dean of the Yale Medical faculty. The British Medical Research Council says in its report on “Alcohol: Its Action on the Human Organism” (p. 124) :
Alcohol in its various preparations has always played a part in the treatment of many diseases, and it is only in recent times that its usefulness has been questioned. The use of alcohol in hospitals has been much reduced, without injury to the patients, and in some clinics it has been abandoned altogether.MODERN ATTITUDE vs. OLD REGIME 47
There is no doubt that too great importance was laid on the value of alcohol in illness formerly, and the only question at issue is whether its prescription has reached the proper limits or should be still further curtailed.
Alcohol Discarded As a Stimulant
While still attributing to alcohol some therapeutic action as a narcotic, for its “limited food value,” and for its aid, in certain cases, in abating “chill,” this high British authority makes findings identical with those of the medical faculties of the leading American schools, who would' discard its use as a stimulant or in cases of fever.
The contrast of their modern attitude with the old regime is emphasized by the example of Dr. Alexander Lambert, formerly President of the American Medical Association, formerly head of the alcoholic ward in Bellevue Hospital, New York, brother of Dr. Samuel W. Lambert, and, in this matter, his professional opponent.
In a symposium on alcohol followed by a discussion before the Medical Association of Greater City of New York (New York Medical Journal and Record, Feb. 15, 1928) Dr. Samuel Lambert pronounced alcohol a “necessity” in pneumonia and the fevers of infectious diseases, not as a heart stimulant but as a food. He had counted the calories not only in alcohol, but in measured doses of whiskey, apparently assuming that it is48 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
dependable when properly aged and matured. Dr. Alexander Lambert replied that he found himself “in hearty disagreement with most that has been said by my brother and Dr. Coleman.” He added:
There is one remark that Dr. Stoekard made in which I think he is mistaken. He says “that alcohol does not injure the brain as does opium.” I have seen many opium and morphine addicts. I have unpoisoned many of both kinds of narcotized human beings. Clinically the observation has forced itself upon me that more often a person who has been addicted to alcohol has been left, when you unpoisoned him, with a more damaged personality than occurs in those who have even for many years taken opium. This is noticeable especially as seen in the Korsakoff's syndrome, where in reality a personality has been burnt out in depth and finer portions. In an addict who has been poisoned and perverted by opium, if you unpoisoned him, you find the brain has only been functionally disturbed; the personality comes back better to its normal than in those injured by alcohol. That conclusion was forced upon me by personal experience, contrary to what I have been taught. The great clinical teachers of the last generation quoted-here, have been, as with my brother, my teachers and my friends, whose opinions I respected, often admired, but who I found, great as they were, were human beings whose judgment was not infallible.ALCOHOL NOT NEEDED IN FEVEES 49
In the matter of the prolonged fevers, as typhoid, I, too, was brought up to believe and was taught that alcohol was necessary as a remedy. I found that my patients did better, that I had a lower death rate and less perforations, less hemorrhages, when I gave up the use of alcohol.
In studying pneumonia patients I realized that all alcoholic patients were more prone to the disease than the non-alcoholics, and that excess of alcohol increases the tendency in most human beings to infections. I could not, therefore, see the value of such doses of alcohol as I had been taught to use in the treatment of acute infections, either as a food or a remedy. In caring for the pneumonias as they came into the hospital, you were lucky at times if you saved 10-15 per cent of the alcoholic patients. In 1904, I took one thousand cases of pneumonia at Bellevue Hospital and looked up the death rate. I found in the alcoholics it was 50 per cent and in the non-alcoholics 23.9 per cent. How the alcohol could increase the chances of death after they had acquired pneumonia and yet be the drug on which one must rely to put the patient through an acute pneumonia, I could not understand.
With that idea in mind I decided to try to find out what would be my results in the treatment of pneumonia patients if I cut off all alcohol. Therefore I did not permit any alcohol to be given to the non-alcoholic patients and ruthlessly cut off all alcohol from the alcoholics. I tried 100 patients consecu-50 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
tively, first without alcohol, and then with alcohol, and found the death rate for several years was invariably 10 per cent lower when I did not give the alcohol than when I did give it. I repeated this experiment four or five times. I looked in the record at Bellevue Hospital and found that my confreres in the other divisions who had not used alcohol in treating pneumonia, had a lower death rate than did those who had used it.
In view of multiplied reports such as this and the steady disuse of alcohol by physicians in recent times, the United States Supreme Court rejected the plea of Dr. Samuel W. Lambert.
Few Physicians Prescribe Spirits
As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court declared that such prescriptions were forbidden or more severely hedged about in the majority of States than in the Federal law. At the time of the passage of the Volstead Act and the Willis-Campbell Act, or both, in seven States no intoxicating liquor of any kind could be prescribed. In three States prescriptions could be made only if the liquor was made unfit for beverages purposes. In fifteen States only alcohol could be prescribed for medical purposes. In three States no more than a stated quantity of intoxicating liquor fit for beverage purposes can be prescribed at one time. In eleven States the standards of the Federal law have been specifically adopted. In twoDISUSE OP WHISKEY PRESCRIPTIONS 51
States only, physicians not holding a Federal permit may prescribe such liquors.
Furthermore, only a minority of physicians residing in States that permit medicinal whiskey at all are now using the privilege of prescribing it. Commissioner of Prohibition, Dr. J. M. Doran, reported March 29, 1928, the smallest amounts of whiskey withdrawn annually for medicinal purposes in the history of Prohibition. Dr. Doran said: “It might be interesting to state that of the physicians residing in the States permitting medicinal whiskey but 43 per cent of them used prescription books during the past fiscal year, and while each physician is permitted under the law to use four prescription books a year, less than 30 per cent of them made use of the privilege of using four books.”
It is not recorded that this disuse of their privilege by physicians has occasioned any visible increase in the death rate. Quite the contrary.CHAPTER IV
IN DEATHS FROM ALCOHOLISM!
Wet View
Dr. Fabian Franklin, author of “The ABC of Prohibition,” calls attention to the fact that the general decrease in the death rate for all causes is manifest in European countries that are without Prohibition, and in the wet as well as dry States of this Union.
This statement is borne out in a study by John K. Core, Vice President and Actuary of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, which Mr. Gore submitted to the annual convention of the Association of Life Insurance Presidents in December, 1927. He says: “In fact, as nearly as I can ascertain, the United States ranks no higher than tenth in the great work of prolonging human life.”
In Mr. Gore’s table on world death rates per 1,000 of population, the United States stands, in the order named, after New Zealand, Netherlands, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ontario, England and Wales, and Switzerland.
52GROWING AMERICAN ALCOHOL MORTALITY S3
World Death Rates From All Causes
Taken from the published data of the various countries Standardized Rates per 1,000 of population. (Standardized according to the 1901 census of England and Wales.)
Countries	1901-05	1911-15	1921-25
New Zealand		. 10.4	9.0	8.1
Netherlands 		. 14.3	11.5	9.4
Australia 		. 12.3	11.0	9.4
Norway		. 12.0	10.8	9.5
Denmark 		. 12.8	10.9	9.6
Sweden 		. 12.7	11.1	9.6
Ontario 		. 12.2	11.7	10.3
England and Wales.	. 16.0	13.7	10.9
Switzerland 		. 16.5	13.6	11.4
United States		. 16.7	14.0	11.7
That prohibition is not a cause of the decreasing general death rate in the United States is, it is claimed, shown by the growing American death rate from alcohol. The rate in 1925 for the United States registration area, comprising nearly the whole population, rises two and three-fifth times above the 1920 rate. This was reported at the Annual Conference of State and Territorial Health Officers and the Public Health Service at Washington, D. C., May 31,1927, by Dr. Matthias Nicoll, Jr., Commissioner of Health of New York.
The increased alcoholic mortality since 1920, Dr. Nicoll declares, is due “in great part to the establishment of a vast national and international machinery for the illicit manufacture, importation and distribution of alcoholic beverages, a54 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
large proportion of which are unfit for beverage purposes.”
Unfortunately, however, there has been, and there is, especially to-day, a reluctance to report alcoholism as a cause of death. Consequently, statistics may be seriously inaccurate.
Rising Death Rate from Alcoholism
Dr. Louis I. Dublin, Statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York, reports that there has been a “constant rise in the death rate from alcoholism and from the associated condition of cirrhosis of the liver. Both of these diseases,” Dr. Dublin continues, “were at a minimum in 1920. They are now at a point almost as high as in the decade prior to Prohibition.” In his paper, read at the meeting of the American Public Health Association in Cincinnati on October 19,1927, Dr. Dublin notes that the alcoholic death rate of the colored population has risen to the pre-Prohibition level.
In the Statistical Bulletin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company for March, 1927, a rise in deaths from alcoholism since national Prohibition is reported among American wage-earners. The results in thirteen of the larger States indicate a general increase of the rate since 1920, while the data for the smaller States “also point strongly to a rising death rate from alcoholism since 1920.” Among Metropolitan industrialALCOHOLIC DEATHS OE WORKMEN 55
policy-holders in the United States the combined death rate for alcoholism and acute alcoholic poisonings in 1926, was 4.1 per 100,000, a rate identical with that in 1911, the initial year studied. The 1926 death rate was the highest since 1917, and 24 per cent over 1925. It was three and one-sixth times that for 1920, the opening year of national Prohibition, when the minimum was recorded. The report suggests that the mounting figures of alcoholic and cirrhosis deaths of working-men might very well reach a higher point in 1928, and adds:
Under present conditions of death certification, the number of deaths actually caused by acute alcoholic poisoning is undoubtedly understated. If we had more autopsies and intensive investigations of obscure fatalities, the number of such cases would undoubtedly be much increased.
The deaths of insured workers in Canada, on the other hand, show a rate for the fifteen-year period 1911-1925, of only 0.9 per 100,000, as contrasted with 3.4 for the insured in the United States. “Pew as they are,” the Metropolitan report comments, “the deaths in Canada also indicate that the alcoholism death rate was considerably higher ten and fifteen years ago than in the more recent years.” It concludes: “The rising alcoholism death rate in this country since 1920 cannot, in our judgment, be explained by56 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
increased consumption of ‘hard’ liquor as compared with wartime and pre-wartime years. The reason must lie, we think, in the greater toxicity of the alcoholic liquors which are now used so generally throughout the country.”
The Metropolitan Life’s death rate from alcoholism per 100,000 for all persons and ages has risen from 1.2 in 1911 to 2.9 in 1915; it declined to .4 per 100,000 in 1920, and thereafter rose to 2.4 in 1927; from cirrhosis of the liver the death rate has declined from 10.9 in 1911 to 5.1 in 1927; but the 1927 rate represents a steady increase since 1924, when it was 3.9.
Alleged Poisonous Quality of Liquor
Dr. Charles Norris, Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, reports to the Mayor of that city concerning poisonings from the consumption of alcohol or denatured alcohol during the years 1925-1926. Dr. Norris says there is “practically no pure whiskey now obtainable even for medicinal purposes,” and that the stuff that passes for whiskey is largely made from denatured alcohol. He finds from the records of New York City that deaths from alcoholism have increased from 621 in 1910 to 741 in 1926; that alcoholic admissions to Bellevue Hospital numbered 4,938 men and 986 women in 1926; that alcoholic discharges from the hospitals of the Department of Public Welfare were 3,437 in 1925“ACTUALLY NO PROHIBITION” 57
and 3,515 in 1926; that “experience has tanght us, and it is common knowledge, that at least all people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now, provided they are still alive, leaving entirely aside the question whether they drink more or less.”
Dr. Norris’s opinion, based on the experience of the medical examiner’s staff and his own, is that there is ‘‘actually no Prohibition.” He says that “instead of licensed saloons, open to inspection, there are speak-easies which greatly outnumber the licensed saloons of former days. The situation is difficult of control by Federal, State or municipal authority. When speak-easies are closed they spring up like mushrooms in the same field again . . . Because of the poor and poisonous quality of the liquor consumed, steps must be taken as promptly as possible to remedy this public menace. The mortality from this cause, in my opinion, is larger than the vehicular accidents and the illuminating gas poisoning cases combined.”
Concerning remedies, Dr. Norris says: “Until all our citizens take a pledge, there is only one remedy—the absolute and strict enforcement by Federal, State and municipal authorities. To function perfectly the Eighteenth Amendment must prohibit importation, compel the closure of all commercial and private stills and home brews, the elimination of bootlegging, and the establish-58 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
ment of a corps of strictly honest Prohibition officials, if any such can be recruited in the United States.”
Then Dr. Norris presents the “reverse of the medallion”; it is “that the customs, habits, morals and religious observances of millions of people are to be altered by some miraculous psychologic transformation, which I have seen, heard or know nothing of. Appeal to common sense and unity of ideals and standards seems to me to be the only effective remedy. In a democratic country the ballot, after all, is the determining factor, the solution of a grave public health menace.”
Dry View
It is not traces of poisonous dénaturants in bootleg liquors that do mischief. Dr. George H. Bigelow, Commissioner of Public Health of Massachusetts, and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station have banished this bogey. In his report covering the years 1910-1925, Dr. Bigelow remarks on the general feeling that deaths from alcoholism are due largely to unanalyzed liquor and in many instances to dénaturants knowingly introduced by order of the “nefarious Treasury Department.” He says:
Aged Liquor More Poisonous Than Unaged
It is claimed by many persons that if pure whiskey is furnished it can be drunk withMYTH OF POISONED LIQUOR DEATHS 59
impunity and without injury. Persons making this argument ignore the fact that alcohol, the principal constituent of whiskey, is a poison. Others have stated that raw, unaged whiskey is full of fusel oil, aldehydes, etc., which are violent poisons. It can be readily ascertained by looking over the literature that aged liquor, or so-called pure liquor, contains more fusel oil, aldehydes, acids, etc., than does unaged liquor.
The Federal Census Bureau supplies the figures by States for the deaths, both from alcoholism and from cirrhosis of the liver, as well as from wood alcohol and denatured alcohol, so far as such figures are available. These Federal statistics have been supplemented for 1926 by wire directly from State Registrars. It is found:
1.	That the alleged increase of deaths from so-called poisoned liquor seems to be a myth. This confirms the finding of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station that the only important poison involved is alcohol itself.
2.	That the death rates from alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver have increased most rapidly where nullification has been greatest, particularly in New York and Maryland, which have no enforcement codes.
Death Bate Highest in Nullification Area
In those two States where Governor Smith and Governor Ritchie have led in nullification, the death rates have increased by leaps and bounds,60 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
until, in the ease of alcoholism, they have actually reached, or exceeded, the pre-Prohibition level.
By the pre-Prohibition level is meant the average of the years 1910-1916; as partial Prohibi-
Death Rates per 100,000
MORTALITY DUE TO ALCOHOLISM IN THE UNITED STATESBEDUCED AMEEICAN DEATH BATE 61
tion, or war-time restrictions, began in 1917, three years before total Prohibition.
Gore’s table on world death rates which forms the wet exhibit is admirable in that it compares three groups of five years each, namely, 1901-1905, 1911-1915, and 1921-1925. Thus the trend of mortality is traced simply and some of the irregularities of individual years are avoided. By contrasting the rate in the Prohibition period 1921-1925, with that for the five years 1911-1915, it is seen that the United States does not stand in the tenth place, but in the second place, among the nations listed in the work of prolonging human life.
Progress is shown by the reduction in the death rate. The reduction in the death rate between these two periods for all causes in the United States is 2.3 per 1,000 population. This is greater than the reduction achieved by New Zealand, Netherlands, [Australia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ontario, and Switzerland, and is within 0.5 per 1,000 of the figure for England and Wales.
This is despite the fact that the people of these other countries are, for the most part, homogeneous or long accustomed to living together with similar or unified customs and language. In the United States, on the other hand, one person in every fifteen in 1920 was born in a country which had pre-war death rates from 1 to 34 per cent higher than that of the United States,62 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
Prohibition Lightens Mortality of Women
and Children
Considering the time required to change standards among millions of these transplanted people of differing languages, health customs and habits of living, and the fact that one-tenth of our population is of the colored race, the pronounced reduction in mortality during the period of national Prohibition is gratifying. In his address of October, 1927, before the American Public Health Association, Dr. Dublin of the Metropolitan Life points out several facts :
1.	That the death rate of the United States in the Prohibition years was clearly lower from 1921-1926 than in the pre-Prohibition years 1911-1917.
2.	That the Prohibition period “is characterized,” in Dr. Dublin’s words, “by a sharply declining mortality among children and adolescents of both sexes and in a number of additional age periods among women.” That is, “over half of the total population appears to have experienced a favorable influence in mortality during recent years.” While the improvement is partly due to general health preventive and curative activities, Dr. Dublin adds that with respect to the death rate of children, adolescents and young women “it would be too much to say that the conditions within the home during Prohibition years had not been instrumental in furthering the decline.” The observations ofWOMEN AND CHILDBEN LIVE LONGEE 63
the army of social workers, insurance agents and business men “from one end of the country to the other are virtually in accord that the years of Prohibition have seen an improvement in the economic condition of the homes of the great mass of the American people.” It has even been suggested, he continues, “that the 10 per cent of the wages which under the old regime went into the liquor traffic is now largely diverted into channels which mean increased protection and welfare of the family.”
But in the mortality of adult males, Dr. Dublin finds that the death rate in the United States is not falling so fast as it might fall. People may not drink so much as formerly, and on this account their families experience a gain; but by continuing to subject themselves to the influence of alcohol they are losing the chance of improving their own health and length of life.
Their opportunity for this benefit was never greater than now. President Kingsley of the New York Life Insurance Company recently noted that science has pushed the dead line much further back, permitting proportionately more persons to come through the productive period. Up to 57 the average life is longer than before.
Alcohol Characterized a Slower Age
By yet another measurement Mr. Kingsley reckons that the average man probably lives twice64 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
as long as his ancestors did a generation ago, and five times as long as those of two centuries earlier. This is because survivors at 57 have done from two to five times the work and had from two to five times the experiences and joys of their not distant ancestors who reached that age. We must “learn to live still faster,” he urges, and “to achieve more” within the bounds of earthly existence. The difference in speed of living is quite comparable between the motor-car and the buggyriding eras, so that Mr. Kingsley calculates that in absolute values life has been lengthened to an equivalent of 120 to 300 years. By further developing the alertness and co-ordination of mental and physical powers, Mr. Kingsley predicts that the 100, 200 or 300 years’ life experience already virtually gained may be increased to the equivalent of 1,000 years. He answers the query whether men can really do this by saying, “Certainly they can.” Our higher nervous centers are not yet fully developed, yet every year hastens this consummation.
This is the conclusion, also, of Frederick Tilney, head of the Neurological Department of Columbia University, after a lifelong study of the human brain. In his just published book, “The Brain from Ape to Man,” Dr. Tilney shows that the characteristic difference between man and the lower animals is precisely in these centers that confer the “far-reaching benefits of that important neu-PARALYZING THE MOTOR CENTERS 65
ral attribute known as inhibition . . . For the direct reflex reaction,” he notes, inhibition “substitutes the deliberately considered act. For the limited reflex motor pattern, it substitutes the more complexly organized motor design.” (P. 1038.) Again: “From a minor position in nerve organization the centers which controlled movement and later co-ordinated movement with the eye, completely overshadowed and dominated the others. It was these centers which in the end made possible that delay between received impulse and outgoing impulse which to-day enables us to judge and to make a choice of action.” But it is these new movement centers, latest in evolution, that are most directly attacked by alcohol. The effect of alcohol, authorities agree, is to paralyze these motor centers which have enabled man by conscious effort to prolong his existence, both absolutely and, in the Kingsleyan sense, by speeding and intensifying the processes of living.CHAPTER V
IN POVERTY, CRIME AND DISEASE f
"Wet View
It is the wet contention that insofar as vice, crime, and disease associated with drunkenness have been caused or occasioned by Prohibition, it has increased poverty because all these forces are immediately destructive of wealth. Silas Hardy Strawn, retiring president of the American Bar Association, declared in August, 1928:
The crime surveys show that crimes of violence, especially in the urban centers, committed largely by bootleggers and beer runners, have increased to an alarming extent. It is asserted that the existing condition conduces to a growing disregard of all law, especially by our young people, to an extent that is appalling. Frequently we read of policemen and law-enforcing officials being bribed and debauched and of innocent victims being shot down by overzealous officers in their efforts to enforce the Volstead Act.
Reports of Increased Crime
By their admission of wholesale corruption and criminality of the Federal and local Prohibition enforcement forces the drys admit the truth of this charge. Hudson Maxim, in his pamphlet,
66OVERCROWDED COURTS	67
“Some Thoughts and Talks on Prohibition,” remarks :
Our police and detective forces are so busy trying to enforce Prohibition and in hunting bootleggers and chasing rum-runners that they cannot properly protect us against thieves, bandits, burglars and highwaymen, while our courts are so crowded with Prohibition cases that even murder must often go unpunished.
The report of the National Crime Commission, February 27,1928, notes that the “most startling thing” in modern crime “is the small number of criminals caught by the police.” It adds:
Eobbery in Buffalo, for example, must be a particularly lucrative calling. As arrests are made in only 3 per cent of the cases, the number who are finally convicted is necessarily so small that the luckless individual who is occasionally caught and convicted must attribute his misfortune to an act of God, as he would in case of disastrous storm, shipwreck or earthquake. .	. .
The combined figures on manslaughter and murder show 82 per cent of arrests, as compared to crimes reported in England. The same figures for St. Louis are only 16 per cent, for Kansas City 36 per cent, and for Baltimore 68 per cent. Cleveland, which has the high-water mark of efficiency on these crimes, averaged 83 per cent, or 1 per cent more than in England. However, on robbery68 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
Cleveland has a record of 49 per cent, as compared to 80 per cent in England.
It was a deep-seated and almost nationwide feeling based on the every-day news, Fabian Franklin says in “The A B C of Prohibition,’’ that led to the recent formation of the National Crime Commission. Among the leading figures in the movement for this Commission was the late Elbert H. Gary, President of the Steel Trust and prominent champion of Prohibition. Edward E. Gore, retired president of the Chicago Crime Commission, said early in 1928 that 60 per cent of convicts in Joliet penitentiary are under 25, and that girls are playing a more conspicuous part than ever before in crime history. New York’s Committee of Fourteen, devoted to an impartial and scientific study of prostitution, reported July 8, 1928, that conditions of vice in that city are at a lower standard than they have been in twenty years; that night clubs and speakeasies violating the liquor laws had caused a moral decline, and the hostesses in these resorts were likened to old saloon habitues by the investigators.
Speaking before the American Institute of Banking Forum, Alfred J. Talley, formerly Judge of General Sessions in New York City, said March 1, 1928:
Prohibition is a cancer eating its way into the vitals of American life because of the ter-SPEAKEASY CLUB VICE
69
rible effect it is having upon the lives of our hoys and girls. Foreigners are not the criminals here; but their sons who are the products of our education, environment and peculiar training may well be. If there is no remedy for existing conditions we cannot survive. No country can stand up under a reign of lawlessness and disorder.
The Committee of Fourteen reports that “the speakeasy club situation is in some respects as serious as, if not more so than, the Raines-law hotel which called the committee into existence a quarter of a century ago.” It continues:
For one thing, they are attracting young men and young women of a class who never would have visited the old-time Eaines-law hotel. Some of these “clubs” are cloaked with an apparent respectability which is likely to throw the unsophisticated off their guard. The saloons or the Raines-law hotels never catered to young persons of that class, and yet in later years were not permitted to go to such lengths. This is a matter for the people of New York to consider most seriously.
Report of Alcoholic Diseases
In the increase of disease associated with alcoholism it is significant that the colored race, which constituted nearly ten and a half million of the population of ninety-five million in 1920, has suffered the higher mortality among both males and70 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
females. But white males in the registration area which covers most of the United States have experienced a check in their mortality improvement with the years of national Prohibition, and mortality among men has definitely risen after age 35. (“Has Prohibition Improved the Public Health?” by Louis I. Dublin, Statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Annual Meeting American Public Health Association at Cincinnati, 0., October 20, 1927.) With respect to white men, Dr. Dublin remarks that an improvement in tuberculosis has “gone hand in hand with an increase in the mortality from pneumonia, from accidents, from heart disease and kidney disease.” He adds:
During this period there has been a constant rise in the death rate from alcoholism and from the associated condition of cirrhosis of the liver. Both of these diseases were at a minimum in 1920. They are now at a point almost as high as in the decade prior to prohibition. The pictiire we have found to exist in the mortality of adult men in the United States is entirely consistent with the observations universally confirmed of a continued widespread indulgence in alcoholic beverages by men. Prohibition has not been particularly effective in that sex and especially has this been true in the cities, and, more particularly, in the eastern States.
If the saloon has gone and the great body of men no longer spend a large part of theirUSE OF ALCOHOL BY MEN
71
wages on liquor, it is only too clear that what they do drink now, even if in smaller quantities and at a lesser total cost, is of such a deleterious character, as to result in no advantage to their health. The quality of liquor used throughout the country is sufficiently bad to makeup for the smaller quantity consumed. The economic gains help us to understand the condition among women and children; the character of the present supply of liquor helps us to understand the lack of improvement which appears in the mortality of men.
There can be little question as to the unsatisfactory situation now confronting large areas of the country as regards the use of alcohol by men. Beginning with 1920, there has been a continuous and marked rise in the number of deaths resulting from the use of alcohol. In 1920 the death rate from this condition reached its minimum, namely, 1.3 per 100,000. Every year since then, virtually with no exception, has seen a rise and the rate is now more than three times as high as it was only six years ago.
The same condition is found to exist among the industrial classes as among those of larger incomes whose insurances are carried in the ordinary departments of the insurance companies. The insurance results are confirmed by the population figures for the several States and this phenomenon is widely observed, larger States showing more strikingly what can be found in the smaller ones with a little more searching. In Maryland,72 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the alcoholism death rate in 1926 was the highest ever recorded since 1911. In Rhode Island, Michigan and New York, the 1926 rate was the highest with a few exceptions. The records of hospitals for the insane tell a similar story. This situation is in striking contrast with what has occurred in neighboring Canada.
Finally, Dr. Dublin notes the increase of degenerative diseases which are commonly affected by alcoholic indulgence:
The death rate from alcoholism alone is not high. Deaths from alcoholism and from alcoholic insanity are only a small part of the total. These figures are important not so much on their own account, but rather as indications of a condition or habit of life which now prevails. Much more important than the deaths from alcohol are the deaths from the degenerative diseases, such as heart disease, kidney diseases ‘arid pneumonia,
■ which are apparently on the rise. Just how far the indulgence in alcohol will explain these increases, it is impossible to say. But, in any case, there is no indication as yet of a tendency toward improvement in these among American men.
Day View
In the revised version of his address before the American Public Health Association in October, 1927 (American Journal of Public Health, January, 1928), Dr. Dublin concludes his comment onEVIL IN LACK OP PKOHIBITION 78
the rise in mortality due to the reaction against the prohibition laws in the eastern industrial States, in these words:
We may then say that the effect of the prohibition situation on the public health has probably been good where there has been prohibition to an appreciable degree, and the situation has been unsatisfactory to the degree in which there has in fact been no prohibition. Especially is this true in those areas of the country and among those classes of the people where there has been drinking of the highly deleterious stuff that passes for alcoholic beverages these days. Such a conclusion is at once consistent with the facts at our disposal and squares with what has generally been accepted as the true relation existing between heavy alcoholic indulgence and individual' health.
Alcoholic Diseases Lessened for Nation as a Whole
4
This exactly coincides with the dry view. Whatever effect prohibition has had on health has been good. Whatever effect alcoholic indulgence has had has been bad. Only the flouters of the law in the eastern area have themselves to blame if they have not shared the excellent results which prohibition has produced in the health of the women and children of the entire country. Some of these results they have shared in, despite of their defiance of law. For the reaction against Prohibition failed to bring the death rate up to74 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the old level for the nation as a whole, and only in rare instances, as in New York and Maryland, which were without concurrent laws, has that level in any instance been exceeded.
Both sexes and all age groups have shared in the decline in tuberculosis. To the objection that other health agencies were responsible for that decline the answer is, not wholly. The Statistical Bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, of which Dr. Dublin is in charge, in its bulletin of December, 1926, confutes the attempt to deny a direct connection between alcoholic consumption and tuberculosis. It finds that the death rate from tuberculosis tended to be higher where the alcohol consumption per capita was greater.
The foreign-born are the element of the population most pronouncedly affected by alcoholism. An index of this is found in the hospital cases of alcoholic psychoses. Foreign stock contributes twice as much as its proportion to population, as shown in the following table:
Data of Patients in Hospitals for Mental Disease. Jan. 1, 1923 Parental Nativity Known
Population of	Alcoholic Psychoses in
'	U. S. 1920	Hospitals Jan. 1, 1923
Total ............... 105,710,620	6,520
Foreign-born or of Foreign-born Parentage ............. 38,398,788	5,071
“	34%	77%
From U. S. Census, Table 88, p. 153, Report for 1923ALCOHOLISM IN FOREIGN STOCK
75
The percentage of alcoholic psychoses of foreign stock among white patients in hospitals January 1,1923, was three times (4.5%) that of native white stock (1.52%), or of negroes (1.2%). It furnished 54.5 per cent of the hospital population, but 77 per cent of the alcoholic psychoses. The foreign stock among first admissions in 1922 furnished 49 per cent of all first admissions of known parental nativity, but 63.2 per cent of cases of alcoholic psychoses. The amount of alcoholic psychoses in the foreign stock was nearly twice (5.1%) that in the native stock (2.8%).
The Census report of 1923 states that admissions to hospitals with alcoholic psychoses amounted to 10.1 per cent in 1910, and had been reduced to 3.7 per cent in 1922. The report said
(p. 61):
The decline has been brought about by a change in the habits of the people with respect to drinking, and by the Eighteenth Amendment, and laws prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
The decrease appears in a measure in virtually all States, with marked differences, however, in part due to differences in enforcement of prohibition laws, and partly to the racial composition of the States, some containing more people among whom drinking habits are heavy and alcoholic insanity correspondingly prevalent. Other data76 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
contained in the chapter on the death rates from alcoholism indicate clearly the net gains from Prohibition to the health of the nation.
Grime Wave a “State of Mind”
With respect to the so-called “crime wave,” Dr. Fabian Franklin, champion of the wets, while sympathizing with their efforts to prove all they can, declares his “doubt whether there has been any real foundation for this anxiety.” Dr. George W. Kirchwey, leading criminologist, in a spirited review of the whole crime situation in the Survey Graphic for March, 1926, declared that the “crime wave is a state of mind,” and that “crime is an ever-present reality” before which our established institutions stand frankly baffled. He cited the Census Bureau report for 1910-1923, showing a marked decrease of 37.7 per cent in general criminality in the United States in proportion to the population. He said:
It is true that this decrease was mainly in the minor forms of crime, represented by commitments to jails and workhouses (40.8%) and that during the same period there was an increase of 13.2 per cent in the more serious offenses which led to commitment to prisons and reformatories; but when it is remembered that the number of so-called petty offenders is from ten to twenty times as great as the number of those who commit the graver offenses, the gain to the communityDOWNWARD GENERAL CRIME CURVE 77
from the downward trend of the general crime curve is obviously a matter for gratification.
This becomes more apparent when it is noted that the present volume of serious crime is so largely made up of offenses arising out of the violation of new laws, such as the prohibition and narcotic legislation of the last few years. In the period under consideration, violations of liquor laws increased 326.2 per cent and violations of drug laws 2066.7 per cent, while the increase in automobile traffic accounts for 67.3 per cent rise in violation of city ordinances punished by imprisonment. On the other hand we find the following significant reductions: public intoxication, 55.3 per cent; disorderly conduct, 51.5 per cent; vagrancy 52.8 per cent; fornication and prostitution, 55.7 per cent; malicious mischief, etc., 68 per cent; larceny, 53.1 per cent; and burglary, 11.4 per cent. The falling off in larceny by more than one-half is remarkable in view of the enormous increase in automobile thefts reported from all of our large cities during the last five years.
In addition to the cases above mentioned, the only offenses that show an increase are rape, 33.3 per cent, forgery 63.2 per cent, homicide 16.1 per cent, and robbery 83.3. As to the first of these, various judges and prosecuting attorneys who have been consulted unite in the opinion that the increase in convictions for rape has been due mainly, if not entirely, to the tendency of recent legislationINTEMPERANCE AS A FACTOR IN DEPENDENCY
Compiled by Cora Frances Stoddard, Secretary, Scientific Temperance Federation of Boston, Mass.
(PER CENT OF ALL CASES)
Year	1914	1815	1916	1917	1918	~7*~	 1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924 |	1925	1926	1927
NEW YORK—														
Brooklyn Bureau of Charities!								6 24	4 95	4.27	5.38	7.23	7.87	8.7	9.9s
New York City Charity Organization Society!		• • • •		19.9	19.2			9.2	8.3	7.2	9.9	12.0	12.0	13.7	12.1»
Newburgh Associated Charities				5.771	64.16	23.69	2.97	1.31	0.46	0.38	0.4	*	*	*	
Rochester Social Welfare League §				13.4	20.3	21 4	15.3	4 3	3.8	2.5	3.4	2.5	10.0	11.0	8.47
NEW JERSEY—														
Newark Children’s Aid Society				17.24	16.0	9.74	6.653	4.58	5.19	6.51	8.32	6.98	8.53	8.0	8.1
Newark Social Service Bureau				10.9	10.2	5.8	1.5	4.35	2.0	4.8	10.0	11.47	14.90	*	*
Plainfield Charity Organization Society				13.85	17.3	10.12	10.65	4.66	3.04	4.76	7.37	9.174	11.18	11.9	15.81«
Atlantic». City Welfare Bureau		8.9	9.6	8.21	6.97	6.5	3.87	1.8	1.23	1.3	3.5	2.89	2.26	2.0	
OHIO—														
Cleveland Associated Charities				14.41	17.1	14.65	11.15	5.652	2.59	5.6	10.83	8.97	9.04	9.7	11.51«
Cleveland Humane Society					25.0	24.0	6.5	6.6	6.9	6.6	8.2	6.2	6.9	6.2	12.li«
Hamiltnn Bureau nf Rnnial Work							6.36	4.13	1.76	4.15	5.03	2.84	5.72	6.0	
KENTUCKY—														
Lexington Family Welfare Society					7.76	6.58	6.98	1.4	0.37	1.5	1.7	1.39	0.87	*	*
PENNSYLVANIA—														
Pittsburgh Associated Charities			11.6	19.9	21.36	20.26	11.49	7.64	4.03	5.69	5.44	9.68	9.89	13.88	14.3«
Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity			14.0	18.0	23.0	16.0	8.0	3.0	5.0	10.0	14.0	12.0	7.5	5.37	6.01«
MAINE—														
Portland Associated OharitipR§				29.67	15.52	4.76	2.54	0.59	0.77	0.42	1.05	1.89	2.20	3.6	4.1«
.RHODE ISLAND—														
Providence Family Welfare Society§				4.88	6.41	5.15	3.65	0.3	0.27	0.0	0.71	1.04	0.59	3.5	2.51«
Pawtucket, Associated Charities 		3.46	2.47	4.56	3.34	0.22	2.05	0.5	0.0	0.58	0.33	0.11	0.11	*	
Newport Family Welfare Society}			10.9	18.7	9.9	8.6	9.2	7.5	3.2	5.3	5.9	3.37	1.97	3.6	3.6i«CONNECTICUT—
Hartford Charity Organization Society §;.. New Haven Organized Charity Association Stamford Richmond Housef.......
Year
1014
9.21
ILLINOIS—
Chicago United Charities.......................
WISCONSIN—
Milwaukee Family Welfare Association!
3.39
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA— Washington Associated Charities
WASHINGTON—
Seattle Social Welfare League!
MASSACHUSETTS—
Boston Provident Association.........................
Boston Family Welfare Society........................
Brockton Family Welfare Association..................
Haverhill Family Welfare Society.;...............
Newburyport Community Welfare Service............
Mass. Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children -
MARYLAND— <
Baltimore Family Welfare Association
1015
14.38
Z.2
3.78
11.6
1916	1917	1918	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926	1927
23.8	15.82	11.58	3.78	3.08	1.68	2.25	6.0	6.78	7.65	6.3	6.71«
			13.0	7.0	0.3	3.0	4.3	5 4	4 9	7 3	8.610
4.16	5.82	14.23	7.0	7.61	2.5	2.09	2.0	19.66	11.16	11.5	
8.01	8.32	6.97	6.27	0.61	1.1	2.3	5.5	2.36	2.60	9.3	2.821®
4.35	14.77	8.79	9.64	1.62	3.45	2.29	10.74	7.9	13.6	13.9	
				5.94	3.1	5.12	6.61	10.94	14.36	13.0	11.5®
				0.80	1.73	1.33	1.72	1.87	#	1.8	
14.9	18.6	14.8	11.0	4.8	2.0	4.6	8.4	10.0	8.6	9.3	7.8
	26.1	18.0	10.06	2.29	2.386	4.18	8.36	8.1	9.4	8.6	7.0
			2.0	1.82	3.65	1.8	4.1	*	*	3.5	
34.75	16.23	12.0	12.5	12.98	8.03	1.0	1.19	11.93	16.81	13.71	11.410
20.3	13.6	9.67	11.2	7.0	1.05	2.1	3.0	*	7.87	*	
47.7	*	*	*	*	16.8	20.2	23.2	21.9	18.9	22.2	22.1
		6.6	5.1	0.78	1.48	3.2	5.2	5.24	6.69	5.4	6.5
NOTES: *Data not received. fMajor cases. $See 1809 table p. 1 of “Intemperance m Experience of Welfare Agencies.” § Major cause. 1 New cases. 2 15 months. 3 8 months. 4 Change in calendar year. 5 8 months; a change in the basis of tabulation apparently occurred about this period. 6 7 months; change in calendar year. 7 Year ending March 31,1927. 8 Year ending April 30,1927.	9 Year ending September 30,1927.	10 Year ending December 31, 1927.
The statistics of this table for the years 1914-1923 were originally published in “The Prohibition Situation” by the Department of Research of the Federal Council ©f the Churches of Christ in America in 1925. The Scientific Temperance Federation has carried on the table through 1926 by statistics obtained directly from the organization indicated. It has added to the table the statistics of the Boston Provident Association, and the Cleveland Humane Society, the latter through the courtesy of Dr. H. Feldman.
A comparison of statistics year by year in any single city may be misleading if taken as an interpretation of community conditions, especially where the number of cases is small, for a new plan of cooperation with a particular agency specializing in a certain kind of work may upset the balance and bring a change in percentage which does not necessarily imply a corresponding change in such community conditions as intemperance. Hence the situation as to the effect of prohibition, as far as statistics throw light upon it, must be judged by the general trend in a group of cities rather than by that of a single institution or of a single city.
It is obvious that the statistics relate only to city life. They give no light on the comparative factor of intemperance in the public relief given in towns and smaller communities.80 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
to raise the “age of consent” from ten to sixteen and eighteen years. For the increase in convictions for forgery it is suggested that banks and business houses have united in a more relentless pursuit and prosecution of those guilty of the offense and that the figures given represent not more crime but better law enforcement. The increase in the homicide rate is disquieting, averaging 1.3 per cent in a year, but may be in part explained as an incident of the illegal traffic in liquors and drugs and of the reckless operation of the automobile in our crowded streets, but it may in larger part fairly be attributed to the reckless use of the gun in connection with robbery.
An interesting suggestion is that decreases in larceny, burglary, fraud, and so on, probably mean that the class of criminals which ordinarily committed offenses of this kind have to a considerable extent turned to violation of anti-liquor and anti-drug laws as more profitable. The violation of these laws therefore represents a transference of criminal activity rather than new activity, while, as the table shows, the net result was a decrease of 37.7 per cent in commitments in 1923 as compared with those of 1910.
Less Alcoholism, Less Poverty
On the side of the influence of Prohibition on poverty, there are no economic authorities whoDRUNKENNESS AND DEPENDENCY 81
venture to dispute its favorable aspects. Its influence on intemperance as a factor in dependency is summed up in the table herewith. Twenty-five of the thirty-two organizations show statistics not only for most, if not all, of the prohibition period, but for the pre-prohibition years 1916 and 1917, or earlier. Seventeen of these, as reported in 1926, had a lower percentage of intemperance by from 21 to 84 per cent than the average of their recorded pre-prohibition years. Those reporting thus far in 1927 to the Scientific Temperance Federation, record a lower percentage of intemperance than the pre-prohibition average.
Bearing on the problem of dependency is the subject of divorce for reasons of drunkenness. Married couples are divorced less on this account than in the pre-prohibition era. In the chart on divorce the divorces are rated in terms of the number of married couples. The conclusion from the official figures is beyond dispute that the hazards of disruption of married life because of drinking have been reduced by about one-half since the days of the licensed saloon.82 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Drunkenness divorces per 100,000 married couples living
DIVORCES GRANTED ON ACCOUNT OF DRUNKENNESS IN THE UNITED STATESCHAPTER VI
IN INCREASED DRUNKENNESS?
Wet View
During national Prohibition drunken drivers of motor cars have increased. It is claimed that the Keeley cures for alcoholism have doubled. Police records are marshaled indicating increased arrests for drunkenness in American cities.
If crude statistics of arrests for drunkenness are a sufficient gauge, it would appear that the City of New York, center of wettest sentiment, is the most temperate of any considerable population group in the country; that the States which lack laws in harmony with the Volstead Act or are wet in sentiment stand next to New York City in order of temperance, and that those States that had prohibitory laws before national Prohibition are growing wettest in their habits.
Lawson Purdy, a trained observer, Director of the New York Charity Organization Society, one of the leading tax experts and treasurer of the Russell Sage Foundation, calls attention (New York Times, June 10, 1928) to the small ratio of 20 arrests for drunkenness in New York City during 1925, per 10,000 of population, as based on the census of 1920. This Mr. Purdy contrasts with
8384 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the rate in 1905 of 60 per 10,000 in New York City, from which the 1925 rate has shrunk.
Mr. Purdy uses the figures of the Moderation League of New York, which are not corrected for increase in population. Of this omission the Moderation League speaks in its “National Survey of Conditions Under Prohibition—1927”: “No effort has been made to estimate fluctuations in population from year to year. ... At best such estimates would be speculative and open to suspicion of partisan bias. Only absolute figures, not susceptible to dispute, are here given.”
New York City Comparatively Sober
Without questioning this statement for the present, it appears from this reckoning that, in 1925, there were only ten cities in the United States showing a smaller rate of drunkenness arrests per 10,000 than New York City. The largest of these are Berkeley, Cal., and East Orange, N. J., with arrests, respectively, of 5 and 19 per 10,-000 population. Berwin, 111., Holland, Mich., and Butherford, N. J., match New York’s record of 20 per 10,000. “Of the whole list of 563 cities,” Mr. Purdy says, “there are 282 with 119 arrests per 10,000 or more. Bight on the middle line, therefore, is the city with six times as many arrests as New York. If New York had as many, it would have more than 60,000 arrests instead of 11,011.”DRUNKENNESS ARRESTS IN DRY STATES 85
It is true that New York City’s traffic problem is graver than that of any other city. Mr. Purdy calls attention to the fact that in every city manned with a police force “persons who are drunk and obstruct traffic, or who annoy their neighbors are likely to be arrested.” He adds: “If we find ten times more arrests in proportion to population in one place than in another, we are at least certain that intoxicating beverages are available in both places, and to a greater degree, probably, where there are more arrests.” Considering the traffic dangers of New York, it seems obvious that the strictness of her police in arresting drunken men on this account must be at least as great as in less crowded cities.
But Mr. Purdy’s compilation shows that seven cities of Prohibition Kansas arrested 112 persons for drunkenness per 10,000 in 1925 to New York City’s twenty, and that eleven cities of Prohibition Maine arrested 158 per 10,000, with Lewiston leading the list, 290 per 10,000!
These unfavorable rates are many in the Prohibition South. Little Rock in Arkansas records 107 arrests for drunkenness per 10,000. Columbus and Vicksburg in Mississippi arrested 173 per 10,000, eight times New York City’s record in 1925. The average for five cities in Prohibition North Carolina is 136 per 10,000; of eight cities in Texas, 199 per 10,000; seven cities of South Carolina, 208; nine cities of Virginia, 224; three86 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
cities of Alabama, 231; six cities of Kentucky, 239; three cities of Louisiana, 351; four cities of Georgia, 375, and three cities of Florida, 592 per 10,000. For the fifty-four cities enumerated the average rate of drunkenness arrests in 1925 was 275 per 10,000 in a population of 2,979,656, as compared with the rate of only 20 per 10,000 in the greater aggregate population of New York City. It should be borne in mind, also, that New York City always has a floating population of visitors and commuters numbering many hundred thousands who are not included in her census records. Public drunkenness among these floating hundreds of thousands would lead to arrests that would tend to swell the rate per 10,000 of New York’s population. Yet that rate has been reduced from 60 to 20 in the last twenty years. In considering this long decline Mr. Purdy draws the following conclusion:
One very important reason for New York’s temperance is obvious to any one who knows the composition of the population. Over 69 per cent of the population of New York is foreign born or the children of foreign born. A large percentage of these people come from eastern and southern Europe. They still have their European manners. They have not come to the point where they regard alcohol as a means of drunkenness.
In comparing arrests for drunkenness in theCONDITIONS WOESB IN DEY STATES 87
wet and dry States tlie survey of the Moderation League for 1927 reports:
Conditions in the former so-called “dry” States are very much worse today, compared with 1914, than are conditions in the so-called “wet” States. In the dry States the number of arrests for drunkenness went up rather sharply in 1926, and exceeded any year heretofore; whereas in the former wet States, 1926 slightly exceeded the 1914 level, but did not quite reach the 1916-1917 peak.
The report adds:
One of the interesting things disclosed by the survey is that while the low point of drunkenness in the former “wet” States was reached in 1920, the first year of constitutional prohibition, yet in the former “dry” States—States which had some kind of Statewide dry law before the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified—the low point of drunkenness was in 1919 before national prohibition. In other words, in the “dry” States the increase in drunkenness had already begun in the first year of national prohibition.
Another noteworthy feature is that in the former “dry” States, drunkenness has now reached a considerably higher point, with reference to the 1914 level, than it has in the former “wet” States. Relatively, therefore, the “dry” States are now in worse condition, as compared with 1914, than are the “wet” States.88 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Increasing Addicts and Drunken Drivers
But two other gauges are applied by the wets in measuring the prevalence of drunkenness in the nation. They have to do with the increase or decrease of Keeley cures for habitual drunkards, and the arrests for drunken driving of motor cars.
On both of these counts National Chairman W. H. Stayton of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment has supplied Irving Fisher with data from Clarence True Wilson, General Secretary of the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church, acknowledging inaccuracy in his statement that the Keeley Institute at Dwight, 111., was closed and the Government had filled it with returned soldiers from France. Under date of March 2,1926, Chairman Stayton says, the Superintendent of the Keeley Institute at Dwight “writes that it has been running continuously for fifty years. He states that ‘during the period of regulation (1917 to 1919) the business fell off, but it has gradually built up until last year (1925) we treated more patients than in any year since 1917.’ ” Mr. Stayton checked up on this statement, as follows:
Then we caused a further investigation to be made by an ordained Methodist minister, so that we might not be accused of manufacturing figures. He reports that the KeeleyARRESTS FOR DRUNKEN" DRIVING 89
people were running only six institutions in 1919, and that they are now running twelve, and as to the organization at Dwight, he advises that it had 186 inmates in 1920 ; 289 the next year, and then in succession 342, 392, 350 and 407.
With respect to arrests for drunken driving, Mr. Stayton says :
The figures show that motor vehicles in the entire United States increased 163 per cent from 1919 to 1925.
It is not practicable, of course, to say how many automobiles there were in any one city at any one time, for visitors come and go, so the best that can be done is to assume the nation-wide figures as fairly covering most of the cities.
Prom these cities information can be gotten as to the increase in arrests for drunken driving, and here are some of the figures showing increase in this item in 1925 over 1919:
Per Cent
Boston, Mass....................383
Hartford, Conn..................614
Springfield, Mass...............363
New Haven, Conn................ 753
Providence, B. 1............... 283
Washington, D. C............... 383
Taking the report of the Begistrar of Motor Vehicles for the entire state of Massachusetts, we find the situation to be that90 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
automobiles increased in that State 196 per cent from 1919 to 1925, while revocations for drunken driving increased 740 per cent during the same period.
The New Jersey figures obtained from the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles show an increase of 273 per cent in the automobiles, but 753 per cent in revocations for drunken driving.
From the above exposition, therefore, it would appear that Prohibition is still at its worst with respect to drunken driving, addicts of alcohol, and arrests for drunkenness in the United States.
Dry View
The high price of drinks, as vouched for by twelve reporting out of twenty-five Prohibition Administrators, furnishes a statistical gauge, not hitherto applied, of reduced drinking by the masses during the period of war-time restriction and national Prohibition. The following average prices of alcoholic beverages, as of January 1, 1928, are derived from reports received from Prohibition Districts I, VI, VII, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XVII, XIX, XXIII, XXIV, and XXV, which cover the New England States, Western Judicial District of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia; Kentucky and Tennessee; Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin; Michigan, Minnesota and North Dakota; TexasHIGH COST OP BOOTLEG LIQUORS
91
and Oklahoma; Montana, Idaho and Utah, and Hawaii and Porto Rico. With the exception of lager beer, the 1916 average price of each beverage is taken from advertised liquor price lists of Park and Tilford and the Greenhut Department store in New York. The table follows:
	Average Price		Increase
	per Quart		Per Cent
	1916	1928	
Lager beer 	$ .10		$ .80	600
Home brew 			.60	
Rye whisky		1.70	7.00	310
Corn whisky			3.95	147
“White Mule” bootleg			
whisky			3.20	100
Gin		.95	5.90	520
Gin (synthetic) 			3.65	285
Brandy 		1.80	7.00	290
Port Wine		.60	3.90	550
Sherry 			.60	4.32	600
Claret 		.80	3.00	200
Enormously Increased Price of Drinks
It appears, therefore, that while the standard of living of the majority of those gainfully employed was increasing by less than one-fifth from 1916 to 1926, the price of alcoholic beverages mounted to from treble to seven-fold the price in 1916.
Prom these figures may be inferred both the scarcity of intoxicants under national Prohibition93 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
and the identity of the classes that drink them or can afford to drink them. These classes are composed of bootleggers and patrons who belong mainly to the upper middle and richest classes with incomes above $2,600 per standard family of five, constituting only one-fifth of the population of the United States.
A reckoning of the income in 1926 of the ninety-three million people comprising the combined “poorest” and “lower middle” classes among Professor Willford I. King’s apportionment of four population groups, shows a per capita income of $510, or $2,550 per standard family of five. This allows for each group of five among four-fifths of the nation, only an estimated $117 a year (according to the standard budget estimate by the Labor Bureau, Inc., of New York in several American cities during 1926), which could be applied to omitted items above the “minimum of health and decency, below which a family cannot go without danger of physical and moral deterioration”—to quote the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics on this budget.
Has the standard family of five among this majority of four-fifths put the extra $117 of its yearly income into drink or into savings, insurance, and instalments on radios, talking machines, small motor cars and “Own-your-home” budgets? Statistics indicate that they have trenched somewhat upon their other living comforts, and evenLAWLESS REACTION TO PROPAGANDA 93
necessaries, in order to add these items to their budgets instead of spending surplus income on riotous bootleg booze.
The records of the automobile, electrical and other industries purveying to the masses show where some of their extra incomes have gone, in payments for installment purchases.
But it is admitted that during the period of national Prohibition the propaganda and incitement to law-breaking among restricted classes has caused a temporary reaction of lawlessness and recrudescence of drinking throughout the country, including vet-minded and dry-habited New York City, and the wet and so-called dry States —that is, the States that had adopted state-wide Prohibition before the period of National Prohibition.
The comparative sobriety of New York City, whose population equals the aggregate of many States, is acknowledged by the wets. It is not so pronounced as Mr. Lawson Purdy’s figures would indicate, because of the tendency of the New York police to charge Disorderly Conduct instead of Drunkenness, and to send the helpless cases of drunkenness to the hospitals. Yet it is apparent that New York is comparatively sober. Its growing habit of sobriety has been explained partly by the intensely competitive conditions of living in New York that demand clear brains; partly by the richness of its diversions in education and94:	PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the arts, and partly by the economic needs of its masses. The same conditions governing the rapid development of modern life obtain in greater or less degree throughout the nation. Considering the effort of adjustment to these conditions with the restricted income of four-fifths of the people, during the period of increasing thrift and a rising standard of living, it is manifest that this majority has been helped and not harmed by Prohibition. Moreover, it is not Prohibition but lawbreaking that has harmed a portion of the well-to-do minority and their illegal retainers and the foreign-born who “drink moderately,” as shown in Chapter V, nevertheless furnish the highest percentage of cases treated for alcoholism in the hospitals.
Increased Strictness of Police in Arrests for
Drunkenness
The persistent refusal of the wets to allow for increases of population in American cities according to the yearly estimates of the Federal Bureau of the Census, vitiates their statistics of increased arrests for drunkenness. The accompanying chart makes this allowance as a matter of ordinary statistical practice. In addition, it applies a corrector for increased strictness by the police in making arrests for drunkenness during the period of war-time restriction and national Prohibition.CORRECTION FOR POLICE STRICTNESS 95
Rate per 10.000 population
ARRESTS FOR INTOXICATION IN THE UNITED STATES
This corrector is not statistically perfect. Its results are not satisfactory. But without some measure of differences in police strictness during96 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the period since 1919 and that prior to prohibition and war-time restrictions, the comparative figures of arrests for drunkenness would he of little worth. The omission of this measure by the Moderation League, together with its lack of allowance for increased population, was criticized in the book, “Prohibition at Its Worst.” The hook then applied a correcting ratio for increased police stringency—not as a result of first-hand investigation, and not insisted upon, but derived from a calculation by R. E. Corradini, of 40 per cent stringency during the pre-prohibition era and 90 per cent stringency during the prohibition era.
Irving Fisher has since undertaken an independent investigation covering the period from 1919 to 1927, based on the official police returns compiled by the World League Against Alcoholism in more than 1,000 American cities and towns. This inquiry into police strictness was made through a questionnaire addressed to the heads of police, and the results were tabulated from replies made by 320 police departments throughout the country. Allowing for population increase only, it was found that the rate of arrests per 10,000 population decreased from 192 in 1916 to 68 in 1920, the first year of national prohibition. It then rose to 88 in 1921; to 116 in 1922; to 134 in 1923; to 135 in 1924, and reached a maximum of 140 in 1925, and 139 in 1926. This is below the pre-prohibition high of 192 in 1916.AEEESTS FOE DEUNKEN DEIYING
97
A statistical picture of strictness was very conservatively estimated from the police reports, indicating that before prohibition 55 per cent of the cases of drunkenness were arrested, and 70 per cent for the years 1924, 1925 and 1926. This added correction reveals a percentage of drunkenness arrests of 200 in 1925, the prohibition high point, and of 198 in 1926, as compared with the pre-prohibition high point of 322 in 1917—a decline of 122 points in the peak of the period of national prohibition.
Drunken Drivers and Keeley Cures
With respect to arrests for drunken driving of motor-cars, the conclusions of “Prohibition at Its Worst” are confirmed by the findings of Professor Herman Feldman (“Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects,” 1927). Professor Feldman refers to the Statistical Bulletin of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of July, 1926, which reports an analysis showing that the doubling of traffic density does not double the accident frequency, but quadruples it. Hence motor-car accidents normally increase much faster than the increase in number of ears operated, and probably, in any community, nearly as the square of the increase in the number of automobiles, where drunken drivers are concerned. With sober drivers, of course, the increased chances of98 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
accident are in some degree neutralized by added skill and watchfulness.
Furthermore, cars are no longer driven so exclusively by responsible and trained chauffeurs as they were a dozen or fifteen years ago. All kinds of people drive them, trained and untrained, and accidents increase. The added arrests for reckless driving also are accelerated by increased legal and police stringency. In the case of New Jersey, whose Motor Vehicle Commissioner reports an “alarming increase of intoxicated drivers,” due to easy access to intoxicants, Professor Feldman says: “Let us assume that the explanation is the correct one. We may then ask further: ‘Would the Government be able to reduce the menace of the drunken driver by making liquor even more accessible?’ ”
Another index of increased drunkenness insisted upon by the wets, is in the number of Keeley cures at present operating. These, according to the statement of Dr. J. H. Oughton, Superintendent of the institution at Dwight, 111., now number twelve.
A memorandum from Miss Cora Frances Stoddard, Secretary of the Scientific Temperance Federation of Boston, cites a report by Dr. Oughton that “twenty years or more ago, there were fifty Institutes in operation” which received from the Keeley cure at Dwight its remedy and instruc-FEWER HOSPITALS FOR ALCOHOLISM 99
tions for treatment, and that by 1920 these had
dwindled to fourteen. Miss Stoddard adds :
The list of 6,807 hospitals and sanitariums registered by the Journal of the American Medical Association of March 24, 1928, contains only eight institutions classified specifically for treatment of alcohol and drug addicts. These eight institutions have 183 beds, but the average number of patients is only 90. Three of these are in New England, two in New York, one each in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, all wet centers. The Federal Prohibition Unit had on June 30, 1927, a list of fifty hospitals engaged in treating alcoholism which have a “Federal permit,” presumably for liquor. There is no record as to whether these are exclusively for inebriates. There is no “Neal” institute on the list; at one time there were 60. I compiled and interrogated in 1922, a list of 273 institutions which formerly accepted alcoholic patients, with the following result:
No report .......................... 91
Reported out of business........... 117
Reported “Not Found”................ 14
Reported in business................ 51
Inebriate patients only............. 27
Patients inebriates in part......... 23
Inebriate patients discontinued....	1
In Massachusetts, the one large remaining institution (Washingtonian Home) admits more alcoholic patients than formerly, but the number is about 40 per cent lower than100 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
the pre-prohibition number formerly taken by this institution and the State Hospital for Inebriates, which is now converted to other uses. All the State Hospitals for Inebriates have ceased to function for this purpose. The other one large existing institution for inebriates, the Washingtonian Home in Chicago, was so reduced in patients that it built a general hospital, in connection with which it cares for such alcoholic patients as come to it—about one-fifth the former number.
It appears, therefore, that Chairman Stayton of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment can find no warrant for the contention that the treated cases for drunkenness are greater in number than during the pre-prohibition era, or so great.CHAPTER VII
IN EMPLOYMENT AND INDUSTRY?
Wet View
An estimate that Prohibition has saved and added much more than six billion dollars a year in real wealth to the country is presented in the book, “Prohibition at Its Worst.” Half this amount is ascribed to increased efficiency of labor because of abstinence from alcohol. From the scanty laboratory experiments cited, the argument that more than three billion dollars yearly have been added through the release of human energy and skill to our national production by Prohibition—or would be added if Prohibition were fully enforced—seems to require some modification.
As basis for this estimate it is assumed that alcoholic beverages slow down the human machine, so that each daily glass of beer “reduces productivity 2 to 4 per cent.” From this it is further assumed that productivity of labor would be “increased from 10 to 20 per cent by effective Prohibition.” As impairment is greater the more unequally consumption of alcohol is distributed, the book regards a “10 per cent increase in pro-
101102 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
duetivity,” because of national Prohibition, as a “safe minimum in areas formerly wet.”
Economic Gains Not Exactly Measurable
This basis for an estimate of three billions gained yearly is chosen without regard to the circumstances under which workmen consume or abstain from alcoholic beverages. It is derived from experiments in laboratories under artificial conditions, with small doses of alcohol administered to persons while at work. These experiments could not indicate the effect on efficiency of a glass of beer taken with a noonday meal or on Saturday night, or even twelve hours before a day’s work. They could not show the varying effect of alcoholic beverages on different individuals of differing ages and occupations, in cold, temperate or tropical climates. Even these laboratory results showed widely different effects on the few individuals who subjected themselves to tests in typewriting, typesetting, memorizing, and flexing special muscles. The influences of home environment on the different subjects and of possible psychological factors that affect workers in actual industrial circumstances were quite ignored.
There is little, therefore, in this statistical estimate that resembles the exhaustive tests of efficiency made in studies of industrial fatigue, and of the varying degrees of output to be expectedEFFICIENCY OF ABSTINENT WOEKMEN 103
from definite changes in working hours, sanitary and other conditions that have been applied to the operations of hundreds of thousands of men and women. The exact economic calculations proved possible by such studies are impracticable in judging supposed gains from the hypothetical abstinence of workers whose previous drinking habits and their effects on efficiency are not known with any degree of certitude.
Reliable data of an experimental nature are lacking that would give exact knowledge of the gains in efficiency to be expected of abstinent workmen. They would begin with the average amounts of alcohol taken hour by hour throughout the week, and the proportions of three different kinds of drink, say beer, wines and spirits. The effects of each drink and of each kind of drink would have to be spread over time until its effects were reduced to zero, from a maximum effect in, say one and one-half hours, to a minimum effect of zero in perhaps ten. Then it would be possible to estimate by how much per week, in certain circumstances, the average workman’s beverage alcohol reduced his efficiency.
Proof is lacking for the minimum reduction of productivity claimed, of 2 per cent per glass of beer per day, even though this is based on an even instead of an uneven distribution of drinking among workers, and though it is applied only to the wealthiest part of the country.104 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOEST
Economic Waste of Bootleg Traffic
There remains of the six billion gain thus estimated, some three billion more. This additional sum, it is assumed, was saved “merely by transferring our energies from alcohol production to something possessing true value.” The only factor that would reduce this estimate is the “wasted money and effort represented by bootleg traffic.” This is admitted to be an unknown quantity, but according to the “best” official and unofficial estimates, is considered “very small as compared with pre-prohibition traffic,” The estimate is made without counting any savings in cost of jails, almshouses, asylums, and so on; or any economic savings from possible reduction of the death rate.
But if jails, almshouses, asylums, and the rest have increased instead of diminished under national Prohibition, and if, as is actually the case, the death rate from acute and chronic alcoholism has gone up for large classes of the population and is still rising, these added costs would reduce the calculation of economic gains. The death rate from alcoholism per 100,000 population, although lower than in the pre-prohibition era, has risen from 1.0 in 1920 to 3.6 in 1925, and for cirrhosis of the liver from 7.1 in 1920 to 7.3 in 1925. If these rates, still rising up to 1927, furnish a proper index of increased alcoholic indulgence,DEBIT SIDE OE PROHIBITION LEDGER 105
then the results of national Prohibition are on the debit side of the economic ledger.
The cost of bootleg traffic is admitted as further subtracting from the estimated gains of Prohibition. How large this cost is nobody knows. But the representation that it is small according to the “best” official and unofficial estimates, would exclude the estimate made by Emory R. Buckner, United States Attorney for the New York District, in his memorandum concerning illegal diversion of alcohol (Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, April 5 to 24, 1926, p. 1656). Mr. Buckner comes in collision with the figures of Chief Chemist Doran (who had stated that total diversion in 1925 was only between 13,000,000 and 15,000,000 gallons), as follows:
Between 1910 and 1914 the production of specially denatured alcohol increased from 3,002,102 gallons to 5,191,846 gallons, at rate of increase of half a million gallons a year. There is nothing to indicate that this rate of increase has substantially grown. If the legitimate increase had been the same since 1914, legitimate industries would have used 10,500,000 gallons in 1925. The production of specially denatured alcohol was, however, 34,824,300 gallons.
Loss From Illegally Diverted Alcohol Mr. Buckner’s estimate of 24,324,300 gallons106 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
of denatured alcohol diverted during 1925 does not include the bootleg traffic in “moonshine” and smuggled spirituous liquors, wine or beer. It is higher than the Doran estimate by 9,000,000 gallons. Herman Feldman in his book Alcohol; Its Economic cmd Industrial Aspects, shows that even taking the lower Doran estimate of 15,000,000 gallons diverted and deducting two or three million gallons seized or lost in redistillation and transport, if translated into whiskey of about 50 per cent alcohol, “it would make perhaps 200,000,000 pint bottles of this beverage.” At an average price of say $2.50 a pint, that would amount to $500,000,000 a year on the debit side of gains from Prohibition. The Buckner estimate of diversion would increase this to at least $800,000,000. This would not include the economic losses due to indulgence in denatured spirit, with its known toxic effects on the human organism.
But the extra three-billion estimate is further impaired by a failure to prove that beverage alcohol production is wholly valueless in the economic sense.
This assumption is not borne out by expert authorities as regards the pleasure associated with the moderate use of alcohol by the many, and its medicinal value. That such pleasure is a factor in the real income of the community may not be gainsaid, unless it can be demonstrated that no proper rules of temperate consumption of alco-MASSIVE EXPERIENCE OE MANKIND 107
holic beverages can be framed to make it physiologically harmless in the case of the large majority of adults. The Medical Research Council of Great Britain declares, on the contrary, after a review of modem scientific knowledge concerning the effects of alcohol, that such harmless and temperate consumption is possible; it states that “this conclusion, it may be added, is fully borne out by the massive experience of mankind in winedrinking and beer-drinking countries.” If this is true for Europe it should be true for America. For indulgence in alcoholic beverages in this country has not during this century, at least, been so great per capita as in Europe.
Dry View
It is quite true, as some critics of “Prohibition at Its Worst” have pointed out, that its estimate of gains and savings in annual income on account of Prohibition applied too uncritically, and sometimes from secondary sources, laboratory figures of the paralyzing effects of alcohol. In particular the estimate did not take due account of the fact that during the day’s work alcoholic effects diminish, and that they are less pronounced if taken with meals than if, as often in laboratory work, alcohol is taken on an empty stomach.
On the other hand, as was pointed out in “Prohibition at Its Worst,” Prof. Walter R. Miles in108 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
his “Alcohol and Human Efficiency” stated that “the alcohol effect usually found in the laboratory is probably not so large as exists outside the laboratory.” In reviewing this book, Dr. Eugene L. Fisk of the Life Extension Institute says that he heartily concurs and gives his reasons. Aside from these observations of Dr. Fisk, it should be noted that the main point of Dr. Miles is that in actual life there is a cumulative effect. In the laboratory the one dose is injected into a system free from alcohol; but in actual life that same dose is taken on top of the left-over effects of previous doses.
Six Billion Estimate Still Seems Safe
Perhaps there was too great eagerness in putting the estimate, or guess if anyone chooses so to call it, into figures. Prof. Feldman is right in saying (“Prohibition: Its Industrial and Economic Aspects”) that much more needs to be done before any exact estimate can safely be ventured. But $6,000,000,000 per annum as a minimum estimate still seems conservative, and most of the reasons given for this in “Prohibition at Its Worst” still stand. Even the critics referred to do not venture to argue for a lower rather than a higher figure. They simply maintain that no concrete figure ought to be given.
These criticisms relate mainly to that half of the $6,000,000,000 ascribed to impaired efficiencyGAINS CONFIRMED BY EMPLOYERS 109
of workers. This is less than 5 per cent of the total productivity of the country.
Professor Feldman steers clear of estimates but stresses the testimony of employers:
Taking into account also the concerns which the writer visited, a majority of the total number replied that prohibition had aided individual productivity, while less than half a dozen concerns claimed prohibition to have decreased productivity. This is somewhat surprising because many executives had much to say against the ruinous quality of available liquor. Whatever the ill effects of such liquor may be there was practically no testimony that it has tended to reduce productivity. . . .
The testimony shows that some increased efficiency is generally observable. If the increase were, in any observed case, less than 5 per cent, it seems quite preposterous to believe that it could be observed at all by the naked eye of ordinary observation. It is an exceptional person who can tell blindfolded a difference of 5 per cent in weight, e. g., between four half dollars and that amount plus one dime. Professor Feldman says:
Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, ascribes to prohibition an increase of efficiency in the individual worker of upwards of 10 per cent, stating in positive terms: “There is no question that prohibition is making America more productive.”110 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
There were many “factors of safety” in building the three billion estimate of gain in efficiency. For instance it was assumed that drinking was equally distributed among all workers. Actually, of course, alcoholic consumption was very unequally distributed among different workmen and at different times, and this means much greater impairment of efficiency than when equally distributed. That is, five glasses of beer consumed by one man produces more impairment than one glass apiece when consumed by five persons, and seven pints of whiskey taken at a weekend are more impairing than distributed a pint a day during the week. This was manifest in the prevalence before National Prohibition of Monday morning absences from work, and of Monday morning accidents. These were at a maximum, showing that drinking was more concentrated on Saturdays and Sundays—at just the time when, had there been an even distribution of drinking, the least effects would be expected, because of the time available for sleeping off the effects.
Recent Reports on “Moderate” Drinking
It should be emphasized that all recent scientific tests prove that beverages containing as low as 2.75 per cent alcohol distinctly retard movement in skilled operations, deaden control of eye and hand, and occasion greater expenditure of energy to produce a given result. These are con-CUMULATIVE EFFECT OF DEINK
111
elusions of Benedict, Dodge, Miles, Mellanby, Mc-Dougall, Smith, Vernon, Sullivan, and many other authorities in research on this problem. Moreover, in the second preface to the revised report of the British Medical Research Council in 1924, on the effects of alcohol, Lord D’Abernon notes that recent research has yielded the following results, among others:
It has given a definite measure to the rate at which alcohol is burned in the body, and has shown that the rate is slower than has been generally accepted, thus explaining the cumulative effect of drinking at short intervals.
It has furnished important evidence in support of the view that alcohol does not, at any stage of its action, produce a stimulant effect upon nervous functions.
These facts tend to confute the sanguine statement about the harmlessness of “moderate” drinking as “borne out by the massive experience of mankind in wine-drinking and beer-drinking countries” which the British Medical Research Council has made in its 1924 report.
Furthermore, the statement about the harmlessness of “moderate” drinking is shown to be quite baseless from the contrary experience of the life insurance companies, which extends more than a generation and involves the lives of millions of policy holders.112 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
Increased Death Bate of Moderate Drinkers
This experience shows that the mortality of insured non-abstainers, “moderate” drinkers, is greater by 32 per cent than that of insured abstainers.
Doubtless some of those who pass the scrutiny of the life insurance medical examiners as moderate drinkers become later heavy drinkers, but this risk of becoming later a heavy drinker is one of the risks of being a moderate drinker. There is always the risk that any habit forming drug, if taken at all, will form a habit. The insurance companies when accepting a moderate drinker assume this risk among others, and every one who drinks moderately runs some risk of drinking immoderately later.
It follows that self-administration of a paralyzing drug, so that it increases the mortality of “moderate” users by nearly one-third as compared with the mortality of those declaring them-selvers to be abstainers, can by no stretch of imagination be regarded as an element of welfare to the community.
But is not welfare simply enjoyment, and is there not enjoyment in drink?
There is enjoyment in drink, but it is what a Scotch physician called “an unearned felicity.” In such enjoyment the drug addict, whether the drug be opium, chloral, heroin, or ethyl alcoholGAIN TO OTHER INDUSTRIES 113
has to pay for his pleasure with interest, including an alcoholic mortality of 32 per cent for the “moderate” drinker over that of the abstainer.
For the reasons set forth above, we may regard as annually saved to the nation and transferred to other industries a minimum of $3,000,000,000 that would have been devoted to the production of beverage alcohol but for national Prohibition.
At any rate, the transfer has been made, and is a legitimate part of the estimated gain of six billions. The fruits of the transfer are being reaped by the motor ear manufacturer and dealer, the milk producer, the department store, the chain store and the corner grocery. It is mainly to their interest, as well as to the interest of consumers and society generally, that the billions’ worth of trade which they have gained be not transferred back to the brewers and liquor dealers.
Alcohol Diversion Cut Off
As for Emory R. Buckner’s estimate of 24,325,-000 gallons of denatured alcohol illegally diverted in 1925, it is disputed by Dr. Doran, a better authority. Moreover, diversion of industrial alcohol is being constantly decreased. Commissioner Doran’s report of March 29, 1928, declares a survey has been made and conclusions drawn as to the amount of industrial alcohol needed for manufacturing purposes during each year, and every maker is limited accordingly in the amount of114 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
alcohol lie may produce. With no more overproduction, there can be little consequent diversion.
Even if the expenditure for illegal beverages be as great as the wet estimate in this chapter, it is largely the expenditure of the rich. At $2.50 a pint for whiskey the poor, who mainly paid the former revenue of the saloon, can no longer afford it. Economists agree that except in eases where the distribution of income is the same, a comparison of expenditures dollar for dollar in two different periods is illusory, because ten dollars means to a rich man less than one dollar to a poor man. It would be fairer to compare the present consumption with pre-prohibition consumption not on a dollar basis, but on a quantity basis, and if alcoholic consumption is reduced to 10 per cent of what it was, or even to 16 per cent, the net saving in distributed wealth is tremendous.
In the American Economic Review for March, 1927, appears an article by Irving Fisher, entitled “The Economies of Prohibition,” which records the Round Table on Prohibition held at St. Louis at the meeting of the American Economic Association, December, 1926. This article reports:
The chairman, Professor Irving Fisher, said that, having somewhat pronounced views on prohibition, he had felt it especially incumbent upon him to see that discordant views should be presented. He added: “INO ECONOMIST CHALLENGES GAINS 115
got a list of the economists who are supposed to be opposed to prohibition and wrote to them; they all replied either that I was mistaken in thinking that they were opposed to prohibition or that, if we were going to confine the discussion to the economics of prohibition, they would not care to respond. When I found that I was to have no speaker representing the opposite point of view, I wrote to all American economists listed in “Minerva” and all American teachers of statistics. I have not received from anyone an acceptance.”
This was the best attended table at the St. Louis meeting. No paper was presented opposing prohibition on economic grounds.116 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
GROWTH OF PER CAPITA SAVINGS IN THE UNITED STATESCHAPTER VIII
IN CORRUPTION OF PROHIBITION
AGENTS?
Wet View
As retiring President of tlie American Bar Association in August, 1928, Silas Hardy Strawn of Chicago named as a cause of increased crime since the war, “Organized crime which enables the underworld to make liberal contributions to political campaigns and to exert a powerful influence in politics.” “Frequently,” Mr. Strawn said, “we read of policemen and law-enforcing officials being bribed and debauched and of innocent victims being shot down by overzealous officers in their efforts to enforce the Volstead Act.”
The late James C. Carter, a leader of the American bar, pointed out the difficulties of enforcing a law which declares conduct widely practiced and widely regarded as innocent to be a crime. In his book on “Law, Its Origin, Growth and Function,” Mr. Carter asserts that when such a mistake has been made, its consequences “cannot be avoided by a more vigorous persistence in it,” and adds:	“The spy and informer are hired, but
their testimony is open to much impeachment, and is met by opposing testimony often false and per-
117118 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
jured. The trials become scenes of perjury and subornation of perjury, and juries find abundant excuses for rendering verdicts of acquittal or persisting in disagreements, contrary to their oaths. The whole machinery of enforcement fails, or, if it succeeds at all, it is in particular places only, while in others the law is violated with impunity.” The history of political favoritism, graft and corruption on the part of Federal Prohibition agents is adduced by the wets as evidence in these premises. Thus Representative S. Harrison White of Colorado, in a speech in Congress, June 30, 1928, cited the testimony of Albert Levitt, a professed prohibitionist and formerly special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States that—
The situation in the several States was, and is, infinitely worse than the Federal situation. Local enforcement is, with very rare exceptions, very insincere. This is due to the fact that practically all the local enforcement officers are themselves wet. This is as true of the so-called dry States as of the wet ones.
Record of Shootings and Corruption
Congressman "White recalls that in July, 1926, General Lincoln C. Andrews, then in charge of Prohibition enforcement, reported that 875 members of his force, being approximately 25 per cent of them, had been discharged for malfeasance inINEQUALITY OF ENFORCEMENT 119
office, consisting of extortion, bribery, collusion, conspiracy, intoxication, perjury, illegal disposition of liquor, specific violations of the prohibition laws, and other reprehensible conduct. Noting that the press records from day to day acts of official misconduct upon the part of both State and Federal officials in their attempt to enforce this law, Mr. White complains, also, of the inequality of enforcement.
Those of influence go free, while those of no influence are persecuted.
The occasion for this speech was Representative White’s proposed resolution to investigate the cases of several hundred persons who have been “killed in alleged efforts to enforce the law,” and of “thousands of other persons who have been fired on and many wounded.” The resolution seeks, among other things:
To ascertain and report upon the general attitude and policy of Federal and State Prohibition officers and others called to their assistance in the alleged enforcement of the prohibition law, and especially whether in doing so they themselves observe or violate the law or evade the constitutional and legal rights of the people to be secure in their person and property, and against unreasonable search and seizure.
Senator Edward I. Edwards of New Jersey, in120 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
an article headed “Shot in the Back,” appearing in Plain Talk for December, 1927, summed up the cases of 152 killings by Federal agents and eighty-four other cases where deaths had occurred at the hands of local officers, and asked why there is such zeal in prosecuting violators of the Eighteenth Amendment in comparison, say, with prosecutions of Chicago’s gangsters. The answer, Senator Edwards finds, is graft:
The more cases detected, the more “grease” for the officers of the “law.” A murderer may not and likely does not have money. A bootlegger has. It is noticeable that two kinds of people have been killed by Prohibition agents: the poor and the innocent. The Chicago gunmen who not only broke the Eighteenth Amendment but who have killed right and left, have scarcely been molested. They were guilty and rich.
The wets support their arguments by reference to such cases as that of a respectable citizen of Niagara Falls, who driving an automobile after dark, was suddenly called upon by unknown voices to halt. Suspecting a “hold-up,” he set his foot on the accelerator, and his car was speedily riddled with bullets, one of which destroyed the sight of both his eyes. Two Coast Guardsmen had mistaken him for a rum-runner, and recklessly fired on an innocent citizen. The shot proved ultimately fatal.WIRE-TAPPING TO SECURE EVIDENCE 121
Telephonic Eavesdropping
Another major complaint against the method of Prohibition agents relates to wire-tapping. The majority of the Federal Supreme Court on April 9, 1928, held that evidence got by Federal Prohibition agents through tapping the telephone wires of the defendants in despite of a State statute making such action a misdemeanor was admissible, that their conviction did not violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But Justice Brandéis and three other members of the court dissented. Justice Brandéis made this comment:
Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the Government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” Justice Brandéis added, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.” Justice Holmes in his dissenting opinion remarked, “We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part.” This echoes the words of Justice Brandéis that “If the Government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law:122 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
It invites every man to become a law unto himself ; it invites anarchy. ’ ’
A third count in the indictment of Government enforcement of the Volstead Act was sustained by the Federal Supreme Court on March 7, 1927, in the case of Ed Turney against the State of Ohio. Ohio’s statutes provided for trial by village mayors of those violating the Ohio Prohibition Act. The Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional because they deprived the defendant of his elementary right of trial before a disinterested Judge. The defendant was entitled to a fair trial. How could he have it before a Judge disqualified both by his “direct pecuniary interest in the outcome and because of his official motive to convict and to graduate the fine to help the financial needs of the village”? This violated the Fourteenth Amendment, because Ohio divided, on a fifty-fifty basis, between the State and local subdivision the proceeds of fines and forfeitures in liquor prosecutions, and the Judge of the liquor court got the amount of the costs in each case as his pay for the extra work.
Yet the Anti-Saloon League of Ohio fought for a continuance of this practice until it was ended by the decision of the highest court in the land.
Dry View
When Secretary of the Treasury Bristow took office in the early seventies there was almost un-DECLINE OP REVENUE SERVICE
m
paralleled corruption in the enforcement of the Federal liquor tax laws. After he had caught several of the liquor law violators the Ring collapsed. The Internal Revenue Service was then built up; for years, until politics re-entered the service after the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted, its morale was very high and its record of efficient service unsurpassed. It has since sunk so low that the late Senator Willis testified in the Senate Chamber at Washington that he knew of men who would block appointments to this service in their districts if the Prohibition agents were known to favor the Eighteenth Amendment and its enforcement.
Dry Unit Now Divorced from Politics
General Lincoln C. Andrews, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition enforcement during 1926, testified at the Senate hearings during that year that political favoritism and corruption had prevailed among Prohibition agents. But he reported that his organization had been steadily unified and had won better cooperation from State officials. Dry enforcement during 1927 entered a definite phase, reversing the old political methods and putting selection of personnel under non-political rules of fitness, under a head bearing full responsibility, and with the policies of enforcement subject to approval by the President. That this was achieved not with-124 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
out a struggle is attested by tbe following letter from H. W. Marsh, Secretary of the National Civil Service Reform League, in response to an inquiry by Dr. W. W. Keen of Philadelphia, and dated March 24, 1928:
I went personally to see Congressman Volstead in 1919, when he, as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, was engaged in the preparation of a prohibition bill. He told me quite flatly that he did not approve of the civil service system personally, and that he was unwilling to subscribe to a civil service provision in the bill. As you may know, Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, the counsel for the Anti-Saloon League, was working with Mr. Volstead in very close co-operation in the preparation of the bill. I went to Mr. Wheeler and asked him to use his influence to have the bill contain a civil service provision. Mr. Wheeler, however, demurred, raising some question as to the practicability of examination for such type of position as enforcement agent. I kept after him, however, and with the aid of officials of the Civil Service Commission practically convinced him of the practicability of competitive examination. He finally stated, however, that he believed it would be impossible to obtain the passage of a bill in the House unless the places were exempted from the civil service law. The only draft of a bill that I ever saw, therefore, contained the exemption clause. We tried repeatedly to have it struck from the bilL but did not succeed.PROHIBITION UNDER CIVIL SERVICE 125
As to the second question raised in your letter, we have carried on an intensive campaign throughout the country ever since the enactment of the law with the exemption clause, pointing out the gross incompetency and inefficiency of the appointees under the exemption, and I am glad to say that we have already accomplished an amendment to the law which places the positions within the jurisdiction of the Civil Service Commission. Congress at its last session put the bill through in the closing days of the session, and it was signed by President Coolidge on March 4. The Civil Service Commission is now busily engaged in rating examinations for all the 2,500 positions in the field force of the Prohibition Bureau. The reorganization of the Bureau will not be completed under this act, however, until some time this summer.
On April 22, 1928, William C. Deming, President of the National Civil Service Commission, issued a statement opposing the passage by Congress of the bill introduced by Senator Brookhart, which would have brought into the classified civil service without examination all employees of the Prohibition Bureau in service for one year prior to March 3, 1927, when the reorganization law was passed. Mr. Deming said:
The old Prohibition regime had seven years in which to discredit itself and lose the confidence of the people. The Civil Service126 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Commission should be given at least one year in which to complete its job before snap judgment is taken as to the results. Every reason that obtained in 1927 for refusal to bring the incumbents into the classified service without examination exists to-day with greater force, because our records show how unfit or incompetent some of them are. The alleged demoralization of the Prohibition Bureau as a result of our examinations is largely theoretic.
The Brookhart bill, if passed, in my judgment, will practically nullify the open competition feature of the act of March 3, 1927, and bring upon Congress widespread criticism for breaking faith with thousands of applicants now in the process of being certified for appointment.”
Old Prohibition Force Not All Bad
This is sound reasoning. But bad as a large percentage of the old force was, they were not all bad. In “Notes of a Prohibition Agent,” by Homer Turner, appearing in the American Mercury for April, 1928, Mr. Turner says:
After more than six years of constant association with these men, as one of them, I have reached the rather prosaic and perhaps disappointing conclusion that the average and typical agent is just an ordinary American. He is misunderstood by both his friends and his enemies. . . .
Some of the opponents of the law ask thePROHIBITION" AGENTS NOT ALL BAD 127
agents to answer questions which, they cannot be expected to answer. For example: Why is there so much zeal exercised in the apprehension and prosecution of bootleggers and so little in the arrest and conviction of murderers? Perhaps, as one eminent statesman has suggested, the answer does lie in the character of the men employed to enforce the respective laws. The Prohibition agent, like anybody else, is mystified by the state of affairs. He cannot understand why a man can be caught, convicted and sent to Atlanta for bootlegging, and then be allowed, a little later, to murder his wife in a public park, and gpt away with it. Perhaps it is because bootleggers have not yet begun pleading insanity. Before the agent can open his mouth in an attempt to answer the question, he is given the answer by his critics. To wit, the bootleggers have money and the murderers have not.
But the average bootlegger does not have much money. Very often his fine must be paid by somebody higher up, or, if the sentence be a fine or imprisonment, he must serve his time. His wife is not well dressed; his children are ragged and dirty; his mash adorns his living room; his car, though old, is mortgaged; his grocer insists that he pay cash; when the Internal Revenue agent attempts to collect , his income tax, he finds the poor man penniless.
All this is true, it is answered, because we catch the small fry only. We admit it, at least in part. There are probably more such188 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
small fellows than you suspect. The bigger dealers are not so often caught, of course. For one thing, there are not so many of them. They are harder to catch. They are merely brokers. They rarely come into physical possession of the goods they handle.
But three-quarters of the old force, made up of political appointees, failed to pass the civil service examinations and were disqualified. While it is true that local enforcement throughout the country is still far from what it might and should be, laxness by the local authorities furnishes no excuse for poor Federal enforcement. William Burnet Wright, Jr., special counsel to Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania during that executive’s energetic enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment for four years up to 1927, writes to Irving Fisher:
The Federal Government practically never did anything, at least up to 1927, to show that it was entitled to any co-operation by local officials, but did almost everything to prove to them that co-operation on their part would be catching the violators whom they either authorized or enabled to break the law.
This may seem a strong statement, but there is ample proof to substantiate it. For example, read the Grand Jury Philadelphia report. Also, Mr. Haines stated that the permit system was the first offense, but so long as he was in office after that, he continued toGOV. PINCHOT’S STALWART ACTION 129
permit the granting by his subordinates of permits to known violators of the law, and to persons absolutely disqualified from holding them. .	.	.
In Pennsylvania, under Governor Pinchot, we had practically no assistance from Federal authorities in connection with our enforcement, and General Butler during his regime in Philadelphia had none. We gave the Federal authorities, as he did, every possible help when called upon, and under the State law went ahead and cleaned up notorious conditions upon which the Federal authorities had never made practically the slightest impression.
There is no doubt whatever in my mind that the moment the local authorities for enforcement of law throughout the country are made to realize by the attitude and action of the Federal government, that sincere, real law enforcement, freed from politics and favoritism is to be carried on, every co-operation asked by the Federal Government of the local can be relied upon.
It is with a feeling of reassurance, therefore, that the public reads the statement by Herbert E. Morgan, Director of Recruiting of the United States Civil Service Commission, in the Current History Magazine for August, 1928. Mr. Morgan says: “Under the old regime most appointments were made for political considerations, and it was natural that the appointees should feel that they130 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
owed allegiance to the power that appointed them. An employee appointed through the competitive examination system owes no debt to anyone; his whole duty is to the public. The new force will have a better start on that account.”CHAPTER IX
IN APPROPRIATIONS FOR ENFORCEMENT?
Wet View
Seymour Lowman, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of prohibition enforcement, reported July 28, 1927, that with New York State refusing to cooperate, Federal enforcement of the liquor laws in the metropolitan areas, the Hudson River counties, Long Island and Connecticut was impossible. Mr. Lowman said that 30 Federal agents, or one-tenth of the whole Federal force, had been assigned to this New York district and were unequal to the task. A. Bruce Bielaski, retired chief of Federal “under cover” men, said in Collier’s Weekly, August 13, 1927:	“After
nearly two years I learned that a large percentage of our population does not consider traffic in liquor as heinous as a violation of almost any other Federal statute.” Chester P. Mills, formerly Federal Administrator at New York, declared in the same publication on September 17, 1927, that the party spoils system was responsible for demoralizing enforcement; that “three-quarters of the 2,500 dry agents are ward heelers and sycophants named by the politicians.”
131133 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
What Price Enforcement m New York?
Handicaps to enforcement of the Federal prohibition law are such that Emory R. Buckner, United States Attorney in New York during 1926, filed a memorandum with the Judiciary Subcommittee of the United States Senate investigating the administration of the law (Hearings, April 5 to 24, 1926, p. 1655) saying that if jury trials, should be abolished in Federal liquor cases, adequate Federal enforcement in New York State would cost more than $20,000,000 annually. But if the expense of jury trials were not done away with, he estimated that more than $70,000,000 a year would be required for judicial and enforcement machinery in that State.
The annual prison expense alone under Mr. Buckner’s estimate for New York, assuming that no new prisons were built, would be $1,500,000. Some 1,500 prohibition agents would be needed in this area at an expense of $5,250,000 for salaries and $2,700,000 for per diem outlays, besides an army of assistant United States attorneys, additional Federal judges, and clerical forces.
General Lincoln C. Andrews, predecessor to Assistant Secretary Lowman, in a pamphlet issued for the guidance of prohibition administrators and the entire personnel of the Prohibition Unit, says:
When I took office last year I found thePOLICY, ORGANIZATION, PROCEDURE 13S
Prohibition Unit organized and functioning. . . . Highly centralized in control and responsibility, its field forces organized without due regard to their essential correlation with the field forces of the Department of Justice, prohibition agents throughout were being called upon everywhere to exercise the Federal police power in local police affairs. And these agents were accepting the responsibility and arresting these petty law violators. In many jurisdictions this resulted in overwhelming the offices of the district attorneys and clogging the Federal judicial machinery with thousands of petty police cases, not infrequently to the disgust of the Federal bench and the discouragement of the district attorney. More important even than this moral effect was the consequent demoralization of all the business of the court. Already crowded with business resulting from the ever increasing number of Federal laws to be enforced, that promptness and certainty of trial and punishment so essential to successful law enforcement became an impossibility, and this was being reflected in a growing disrespect for law on the part of all law violators. . . .
Faced with this problem of law enforcement, and with these conditions, we had to answer these questions: ‘ ‘ What have we got to do?” “What have we got to do it with?” “How shall we do it?” In determining upon our policy, organization, and procedure, two fundamental considerations were governing. First, a realization of the fact that any law134 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
to be effective must be in reality an expression of a standard of living generally accepted by the members of the community affected, which means that this standard is already' observed by the great majority of the community, and written into a law only that it may be enforced upon the recalcitrant few by the police and court officers of the community.
.	.	. The second consideration was that
the responsibility for the enforcement of the prohibition laws must be shared by Federal and local authorities.
Prohibition Agent’s Experience
A personal experience of the difficulties portrayed above is given by Homer Turner in the American Mercury, April, 1928, under “Notes of a Prohibition Agent”:
As to the practical difficulties in the way of enforcement, the agent ought to know more than any superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League. First of all, he points to the insufficiency of appropriations. The administrators of the various districts are allotted so much money, and with it they are expected to enforce the law. Invariably the fund is not large enough to permit the hiring of enough men or the provision of decent salaries for those who are hired. The result is an eternal skimping and a steady overworking of the men. It is not unusual for an agent to put in from sixteen to twenty hours a day and be expected to be on the job with the rest of theDIFFICULTIES OF ENFORCEMENT 135
world the following morning. Excessive fatigue is the result, and had work. Even so, at the end of the fiscal year the administrator commonly finds that he is faced with the dilemma of either suspending a number of his men until the new appropriation is available or keeping them idle at headquarters. At such times, naturally, the army of bootleggers runs wild and nobody is there to stop them. This shortage in money is a menace to enforcement throughout the year.
Sometimes the men are so badly overworked that they have to make from five to fifteen raids a day. They have separate reports to write on these cases, and sometimes several reports to make on one case. They get mixed up in the evidence, and sometimes the cases do not come to trial for more than a year. Then they cannot recall all the details of each case.
Of course, from the point of view of those charged with enforcing the prohibition law, the appropriations made by Congress are inadequate. Mr. Buckner’s estimate of the sum needed for New York State alone indicates that proper enforcement throughout the Union would require, in circumstances obtaining in 1926, several hundred million dollars yearly.
But the difficulty lies deeper. General Andrews put his finger on it when he said that “any law to be effective must be in reality an expression of a standard of living generally accepted by the136 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
members of the community affected.” Can this be the case when, as General Andrews testifies in the document quoted, the “citizens of the country generally” have “relieved their own civic officers from their responsibilities, and looked to the national law in Federal hands for the enforcement of prohibition”?
How can appropriations ever be adequate if public sentiment throughout the country withdraws its support from local enforcement of the law?
Dry View
The testimony about the inadequacy of means for Federal enforcement quoted from General Andrews’ pamphlet is not now being repeated by his successors at Washington. In fact, in that document General Andrews declared that things had already changed for the better since a new policy had come into force whereby the Federal authorities undertake to suppress the commercialized traffic in liquor, leaving the communities to deal with local violations. “It has taken time,” he said, “to effect the necessary organization, .	.	. but real progress is now being
made. ’ ’
Enforcement Taken Out of Politics
The Prohibition Reorganization act became effective April 1, 1927. Dr. J. M. Doran was ap-EIGHT YEARS OF PROHIBITION
137
pointed Commissioner of Prohibition with power to reorganize the field forces under classified civil service rules. All officers and employees of the Internal Revenue Service engaged in enforcing the Volstead Act were transferred to the new Bureau. The policy of supplanting political appointments by means of the civil service, of placing business executives in charge of the field forces, and of enlisting local co-operation wherever possible was and is being put into effect. Enforcement now centers on the large sources of illegal liquor supply in smuggling, illicit brewing, and wrongful diversion of industrial and medicinal alcohol.
As a consequence Commissioner Doran reported March 29, 1928, that “Eight years of Prohibition have vindicated the wisdom of the Eighteenth Amendment. It has justified itself morally, socially and economically.”
The Federal forces have run down the main sources of illegal supply. Organized “rum rows” are no longer operating. Treaties with foreign powers have had a wholesome effect in preventing smuggling.
Evaded formulas for making industrial alcohol have been changed; the amounts to be made during the coming year have been severely limited to commercial needs. Figures for the fiscal year show the “least whiskey withdrawn annually for medicinal purposes in the history of prohibition.” Sacramental wine is under control, being “less138 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
than 30 per cent of the amount used during the prior fiscal year.” Cereal beverage production is on the decrease, and close surveillance of large plants holding permits has driven illegal operators into the petty “alley” breweries. Finally, with the increase in convictions the Prohibition enforcement is recovering much of its cost in added fines. Along with these accomplishments Prohibition is working a change in public sentiment. Dr. Doran concludes:
It has demonstrated that the American public does not want the saloon or beverage liquors. There is no question of personal liberty. It is simply a question of the general public good.
The evident results of prohibition are not entirely matters of statistics. They are apparent to the senses and shown in the daily lives of the people. Of course, there is much unlawful liquor and not a little drinking, but these are gradually decreasing.
Students of economics have generally reached the conclusion that prohibition is beneficial and a wise policy. Certain groups of the population think differently, but there is a slow but sure tendency in the public mind to adapt itself to the new conditions, and thoughtful people believe them best for society.
Enforcement is improving in methods, in public confidence, and in the practical results obtained.LACK OF LOCAL APPROPRIATIONS 139
Federal and Local “Passing of Buck”
There is still plenty of room for improvement in Federal enforcement and much truth in the complaint of some State and local enforcement officers that their efforts are balked for lack of Federal co-operation. In short, Federal and local enforcement agencies pass the buck each to the other.
While Federal enforcement has improved, this cannot in general be said of local efforts and appropriations. A report of the Department of Commerce dealing with the cost of city and State government in 1925, records that only $700,000 was used by all State and local agencies for enforcement of prohibition. Albert Levitt remarks in his article, “Enforcement an Increasing Success,” Current History for April, 1928, that this sum was “less than one-fifth the amount spent by the same agencies for fish and game wardens, ’ ’ and adds:
When no money is available for the prosecution of offenders, when officers of the law are in lucrative partnership with the violators of the law, it is foolish to believe that the coercive element of enforcement is sincere.
Yet Mr. Levitt, who is Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University and was Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United140 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
States, is of opinion that enforcement is two parts successful, “in spite of the insincerity of politicians and officials, in spite of all their efforts to nullify the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead act, in spite of their practical partnership with the liquor industry, which is still alive and functioning.” First, in their formulation of the types of conduct permitted and forbidden under the Amendment, the American people have been sincere and consistent. Under this head, namely, obedience to law, Mr. Levitt says:
There can be nothing more genuine and honest than the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead act. The lines of conduct which must be followed by law-abiding citizens are clearly demarked. Forty-six States ratified the amendment. Rhode Island and Connecticut did not ratify.
In the second place, in that most important factor of enforcement, namely, obedience to law, Mr. Levitt finds that the people are “eminently sincere” :
When the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified the people throughout the country accepted it as a fact that prohibition had come to stay. Generally speaking, a very great majority of the people for various reasons gave their whole-hearted allegiance to the prohibition laws. Many of those who had been hitter opponents of the prohibition movement ceased their efforts and publiclyBACKING OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT
141
announced their determination to abide by the Eighteenth Amendment and to aid in the enforcement of the Volstead act. The rank and file of people followed the lead given. Only a minority of the people failed to obey the prohibition laws. This minority was at first secretive and silent. When it was seen, however, that the coercive factor in enforcement was insincerely operative the silent minority became more and more clamorous. At the present time it has reached its most intense state of belligerency, but it still remains a minority of public opinion.
The Promise of Changed Conditions
Conditions and the sentiment of the nation, therefore, are rapidly changing from the circumstances and state of mind that characterized the era of political Federal enforcement, and that prompted Mr. Buckner to name tremendous sums as the price of securing respect for the law. They could only have been named on the theory of enforcing law at the outlet of illegal liquor and not at its source. Of course, any such basis of calculation is valueless.
Congress at its last session set aside $12,729,140 for enforcement during the year 1929. No doubt larger appropriations are needed to strengthen and extend the new enforcement unit. The unit has already brought back into the Treasury, through fines and penalties collected, $38,391,000 of the $61,047,000 appropriated during the first142 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
eight years of national Prohibition. It now employs a higher class of men at better wages. These are under civil service, protected against politicians and assured of the reward of secure tenure and promotion for faithful service. Outlays are still needed for more Federal courts and trial agencies, and more effective co-operation between the States and the Federal authority. By such outlays a more efficient organization can continue to give to the States greater aid and encouragement.CHAPTER X
IN SMUGGLING AND ILLEGAL DIVERSION
OF ALCOHOL?
Wet View
It is naturally difficult to get from official sources admissions as to the quantities of alcohol smuggled or diverted from industrial uses. In self-defense, as the wets contend, the administration tries to prove its efficiency in law enforcement. But when an official resigns or is forced out, or is tried beyond his patience, the public may hear of something besides achievements. For example, the wets quote A. Bruce Bielaski, retired chief of Federal “under cover” men, as saying in Collier’s Weekly, August 13, 1927: “After nearly two years I learned that a large percentage of our population does not consider traffic in liquor as heinous as a violation of almost any other Federal statute.”
Also, Assistant Secretary Lowman, in charge of Treasury enforcement of the Prohibition laws, declared on July 28, 1927, that with New York State refusing to co-operate, Federal enforcement of liquor laws in the metropolitan areas, the Hudson River counties, Long Island and Connecticut was impossible. New York, Mr. Lowman said,
143144 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
had 300 Federal agents, one-tenth of thè entire Federal force, and they were unequal to the task.
Major Chester P. Mills, formerly Federal Administrator of Prohibition at New York, said in Collier’s Weekly for October 15, 1927 : ‘ ‘ Dollar-a-drink clubs with polished brass bar rails and elite customers served precisely the same poison as the dime-a-shot dumps of the wharf sides. More than 96 per cent of all seized booze told the same story—denatured alcohol, cleaned and synthesized into imitations of familiar beverages.” Major Mills reported:
Sixteen independent denaturing plants in and around the New York area were producing at the rate of eleven million gallons of alcohol a year, or nearly one million gallons a month in 1925. In 1927 up to the time I quit office we had reduced this output to slightly less than 500,000 gallons for the year. Which means that previously some ten million gallons annually was diverted to bootleggers.
Detroit As a Port For Contraband
This testimony by Major Mills may be regarded as typical of the situation up to July, 1927, in Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, and other large population centers with reference to diversion of industrial alcohol into beverage channels. With respect to smuggling from foreign countries, the case of Detroit is in point.DETROIT AS PORT OP ENTRY
145
The Detroit Evening News published a series of articles beginning May 2, 1928, which show how Detroit, by virtue of her geographical location, is the natural port of entry for the liquor distributed in the Middle West and the States immediately below the Mason-Dixon line; a territory containing 35,000,000 persons directly supplied from Detroit, and 15,000,000 more supplied indirectly.
These articles estimate that at least $35,000,000 worth of liquor comes annually through a funnel neck of border river and lake front that is barred by a scant force of 100 men constituting the Customs Border Patrol. From data obtained from enforcement officials and persons engaged in the traffic the liquor turnover for Detroit is reckoned at $215,000,000 yearly, as follows:
No. Wage Earners Value of
Branch	Estab.	(aver.)	Products
Open Saloons 	 Pigs, resorts, etc., selling	4,000	12,000	$109,500,000
liquor 		12,000	20,000	65,700,000
Stills 		5,000	12,000	3,770,000
Alley breweries		200	1,650	770,000
Home brew plants		500	1,000	260,000
Alcohol plants 		50	400	4,000,000
Cutting plants 	 Guards, gunmen and other	150	450	1,000,000
retainers 			500	
Smugglers, bootleggers .....		2,000	30,000,000
Totals 		21,000	50,000	$215,000,000
This table represents Detroit’s liquor industry to be nearly three times as great as her chemical industry; eight times as great as her stove and146 PBOHIBITIÖN STILL AT ITS WOBST
heating appliance industry; ten times larger than her cigar and tobacco industry, and second only to her automotive industry.
To show that the trade in smuggled liquor is not exaggerated, the wets cite the valuation set on the Canadian side upon liquor exports to the United States from a single port, Windsor, opposite Detroit. The New York Times of May 27, 1928, reports:	“In the year ended March 31,
beer, wine and liquor exports cleared from Windsor amounted to 3,388,016 gallons, valued on the Canadian side at slightly more than $20,000,000.” The Detroit News tells how an estimated $15,-000,000 worth of liquor comes in annually by freight from Canada, as well as by the ferries, disguised as hay, machinery, and so on. On May 10, 1928, the News reported that a liquor trust with capital of approximately half a billion dollars became operative in export warehouses on the Canadian side of the Detroit Eiver, embracing virtually all the distillery interests in the Dominion of Canada.
The New York Times of March 31, 1928, reported in a special dispatch from Buffalo:
Canadian liquor flows in an almost uninterrupted stream across the international water boundaries of Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Niagara Eiver. Daily the craft of liquor smugglers are loaded at Port Dal-housie, Chippewa, Port Colborne, Port ErieSTEADY TIDE OF BOOZE
147
and Bridgeburg. Nightly the deeply laden vessels chug through the ice floes to land their cargoes at secluded spots on the American shores. And each morning finds the weary smuggling crews back at the Canadian bases with the pockets of the boat owners bulging with American dollars. Against this steady tide of booze a small but efficient Coast Guard unit strives ceaselessly but with little result.
This dispatch followed reports that the Canadian government was displaying no immediate intention of complying with the recommendation of the Commerce Committee which investigated smuggling, and which was subsequently indorsed by the Royal Commission on Customs and Excise, that Canada refused clearances to vessels or vehicles of all kinds carrying cargoes of liquor to the United States contrary to the laws of this country.
Rum Shipments Into New York
On the Atlantic coast, while much is made of the abolition of Rum Row, sworn testimony before Federal judges was published in the New York Evening Post, April 20, 1927, that the bootleggers had circumvented the patrol boats by bringing steamship cargoes direct to Manhattan piers. C. M. Kinder, turning State’s evidence, told how schooners laden with thousands of cases of liquor were taken past the Battery and docked in North River for unloading. The Evening148 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Post’s series based on Federal Court disclosures related to rum shipments that went as merchandise in huge quantities under many guises by bribing railroad workers ; they told of printing plants working overtime in turning out “fake” markings for liquor that was “cut” from smuggled or diverted sources; and of a big business done by direct-mail methods.
Such reports coming through official and semiofficial channels seem to bear out the observation of Chief Bielaski, seized upon by the wets and quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that with respect to smuggling and diversion of industrial alcohol into the production of illicit beverages a large percentage of the public does not consider violation of the Volstead Act as heinous as other crimes.
Drt View
It is true that smuggling of illicit beverages has not ceased, and that there is still diversion of industrial alcohol. But enforcement has been strengthened in both departments. After tendering his resignation, June 30, 1927, Major Chester P. Mills, Federal Administrator at New York, reported decided results of enforcement under handicaps in that district, as recorded in the wet presentation of this chapter. Major Mills said further that, with decent administration free from political influence, he was convinced that theBOUNDING UP CANADIAN POETS 149
sources of supply in the United States could be controlled. The work of A. Bruce Bielaski, Chief of “under cover” men, was especially effective in bringing to book many big conspirators in violation of the Volstead Act.
Dwindling of “Rum, Row”
During 1926 treaties with eight foreign governments were negotiated, or agreements made on the basis of existing treaties, assuring their co-operation against smugglers. The famous “Bum Bow” dwindled and moved out to sea considerably beyond the 12-mile limit. In the annual report of the Department of Justice, December 5, 1927, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General, reported:
Probably it should be observed that during the year Canadian ports lost some of their former attractions as bases for the high-class liquor smugglers. This has been due to the more stringent regulations which have been thrown about in-transit liquor operations by the Canadian Government. The larger and more powerful operators, therefore, have abandoned Canada. On the West Coast they have been trying out the usefulness of the Society Islands and on the East Coast the more extensive operations have been moved to St. Pierre and Miquelon.
During the fiscal year 1927, the Department of Justice reported that 320 American vessels were150 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
captured 'with contraband liquor in substantial quantities, as against 330 in 1926.
The diversion of industrial alcohol into illicit channels began to be checked, during 1926, at the source. Formulae susceptible of “denaturing’' were abolished, and the unions of druggists with bootleggers and the abuse of physicians’ prescriptions of medicinal liquors were seriously grappled with. It should be remarked that this action was belated—six years after the Yolstead Act became effective. In his address before the Economic Club of New York in December, 1926, Assistant Secretary Lincoln C. Andrews announced that very little smuggled liquor was being brought in, and negotiations were nearly concluded for co-operation in the stoppage of smuggling with the only European country from which any considerable quantity was coming. Finally, he reported that it would soon be exceedingly difficult to get any real beer as a beverage. But there would remain the sources of illicit home brewage and distillation, for the ending of which local sentiment must be invoked.
Commissioner Doran Testifies
On July 30, 1928, Dr. J. M. Doran, Commissioner of Prohibition, prepared for publication in this chapter the following statement regarding the status of illegally diverted alcohol:LIMITING OF PEIMAEY PEODUCTION 151
During tlie fiscal year ending June 30,1926, 105,000,000 wine gallons of industrial alcohol were produced in the United States. Unquestionably there was a substantial amount of this diverted. I estimated at the time that the diversion was approximately 13,000,000 gallons. Beginning about two years ago the formulas for denaturing alcohol were taken up for chemical and technical study and at the same time a drive was made to “clean up” the lists of permittees withdrawing and using specially denatured alcohol and other liquors for manufacturing purposes.
As a result of the first move the formulae for completely denatured alcohol were reduced from six to two in number, and the remaining two were strengthened against illegal manipulation. The effect has been striking. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1927, 95,000,000 gallons of industrial alcohol were produced and used in the United States. The statistics for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1928, are not available, but they will approximate the last year.
The Bureau of Prohibition for the year 1928 inaugurated a policy of allocation and limiting the primary production of alcohol to reasonably ascertained legitimate needs and this policy has still further stabilized the alcohol industry.
The agents of the Bureau of Prohibition seize very little denatured alcohol at present, as compared with two or even one year ago, and the miscellaneous samples seized and examined chemically in the Bureau’s eighteen152 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
chemical laboratories throughout the United States show only a small proportion of material of industrial alcohol origin. The principal domestic sources of supply are spirits produced from raw material, such as grain and sugars and the tendency is towards smaller illegal units.
In conclusion I will state that industrial alcohol diversion has been largely solved and overcome, and is not to-day a major source of supply for illicit liquor. I infer from the decreasing size of illicit distillery units that are captured that it is becoming too hazardous to set up and attempt to maintain large illicit distilleries. I would not care to make the last statement a dogmatic assertion, but rather that all information coming to me through the operations of the field force of the Bureau of Prohibition indicates that such is the case.
It appears, therefore, that alcohol diversion is no longer the backbone of bootlegging profits. Major William Burnet Wright, Jr., special counsel to Governor Gilford Pinchot, during his struggle to suppress the diverters of industrial alcohol in Philadelphia, remarks in a letter to Irving Fisher that illegal diversion became a problem because of the “failure of the Government to properly use the permit system.” “If used as it should have been,” Major Wright adds, “it would have prevented almost entirely the diversion of alcohol, and, probably, the granting of any of theTEST OF PROHIBITION SHIFTED
153
sixteen independent denaturing plant permits referred to by Major Mills.”
Illicit Industry Now on Small Scale
At any rate, Major Mills was describing a situation which was already passing. "What has happened was precisely what was foreshadowed in the report of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America in 1925: this pointed out that if the diversion of alcohol which easily constituted the chief source of the illicit liquor traffic should be effectually checked, then the test of prohibition would be shifted to the strength of the small-scale illicit industry. Dr. Doran’s statement indicates that the main problem is no longer the diversion of alcohol. Nor is it, probably, smuggled liquor, despite the magnified reports of newspaper feature writers on this subject. But the back of the illicit traffic will not be broken until the “moonshine” business is broken up, and that is, of course, decentralized and scattered over the whole country. The warfare against liquor is turning into guerrilla warfare.CHAPTER XI
IN A TYPICALLY DRY STATE?
Wet View
National Prohibition in the United States has been brought about largely by those states which experimented first with local option and abolished the alcoholic liquor traffic in the counties. This prepared the way for Prohibition in the whole state.
North Carolina would certainly qualify as a typical American state of this character. It has a homogeneous native population, with only a small fraction of aliens. It started as a local option state, later adopting state prohibition in 1908.
Twenty years have elapsed—a sufficient period of time in which to draw some conclusions as to whether prohibition will be effective in the long run.
The advocates of prohibition have maintained that the reaction to the Eighteenth Amendment is a temporary phenomenon, and that eventually the consumption of alcohol will settle on a level far below the one in pre-prohibition days, and that this Amendment has as good a chance of being obeyed and enforced as any other law. North
154WET AND DRY STATES COMPARED 155
Carolina should indicate not only the effects of State Prohibition, hut also show how National Prohibition affects a state which has been dry for many years. Possibly the experience of this state may indicate how the nation will fare in the long run.
To be sure, Maine and Kansas have been dry for a longer period of time, hut these two states could not so well be compared with wet Connecticut as can dry North Carolina. Maine is a border state, with problems of smuggling peculiar to border states only. Kansas is wholly an agricultural inland state, making comparison with Connecticut rather difficult. Many of the states which have adopted prohibition are in the South and the West, where accurate statistics have not been kept until only recently. The Tar Heel State has had prohibition for a sufficient time to make comparisons significant. It is not wholly an agricultural state. In recent years it has seen great industrial expansion. It borders on the Atlantic. For many other reasons it would seem advisable to take this state for purposes of comparison with Connecticut.
Before Eighteenth Amendment, Dry North Carolina Did Well
Prior to the advent of National Prohibition, there seems to have been little doubt that Prohibition in North Carolina was successful. In May,156 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
1917, the Literary Digest, covering the ground thoroughly in its analysis, reported as follows:
As to the effects of the system of regulation which we call “prohibition,” it is undoubtedly true that it has caused a decrease in the consumption of alcoholic beverages, chiefly as the doing away with the saloons and dispensaries has operated to prevent the education of the young in the use of intoxicants. —The Raleigh Times.
The Christian Sun (Elon College) answers the question by noting the report of the State Board of Health that the “death rate” from alcoholism in North Carolina was 1.4 in 1914 as against 5.9 for the United States in 1913, the latest figures available.
The stocks of building and loan associations have advanced in value more than 250 per cent. Agriculture and manufactures, according to the Governor, have kept pace with the general development, and North Carolina never has enjoyed such an era of prosperity.
In North Carolina, which has had Prohibition since 1909, the Winston-Salem Journal says that it has been a wonderful success and recalls that shortly before he withdrew from office, ex-Governor Craig issued a statement in which he summarized most admirably the effects of the movement in North Carolina. Noting that Prohibition was adopted by an overwhelming majority, he expressed the opinion that if submitted to the people again the majority would be much larger than it was in 1908, for in his opinion the oppositionGRADUAL CHANGE TO PROHIBITION 157
had largely disappeared because the benefits of the law have been demonstrated. Governor Craig proved that since Prohibition took effect the enrollment and attendance of the public schools have increased more than 21 per cent, and the school fund of the State has increased more than 85 per cent. The capital stock of the State charter banks has increased more than 50 per cent, and their deposits have increased more than 100 per cent.
Gradually our views underwent a change. First we were against our own judgment converted to the practicability of local option, but we held out against State-wide Prohibition because we did not think that liquordrinking in large cities could be controlled. When it came to this State, we voted for it, but with many misgivings, and were surprised to find that it slowly won its way, despite lukewarm support and violent opposition.— Presbyterian Standard, Charlotte.
Change for Worse After 1920
But with National Prohibition there came a change in the reports. During May, 1928, Mr. Hugh F. Fox, Secretary of the U. S. Brewers’ Association, reprinted in one of his publications the two subjoined items:
The Charlotte Observer of May 15th says:
Judge Webb, of the Federal bench, found himself faced in Asheville with a docket of over 500 cases, the majority having to do158 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
with violations of the liquor laws. Facts of this kind moved the judge to deliver an address on Prohibition to the grand jury, in which he laid down the ultimatum that the moonshiners “must quit making liquor, or leave the beautiful mountains of western North Carolina.” Which means that Judge Webb proposes to keep the penitentiary doors opening and shutting until the mountain millennium is at hand.
Also:
North Carolina comes next, and we have five cities. The average (arrests for intoxication) for the 5 is 136 per 10,000, nearly 7 times New York. Wilmington is the temperate spot with 70 arrests per 10,000 and Durham is the wet spot with 353 per 10,000, 17 times New York. If New York had as many arrests as Durham it would have over 180,000 instead of 11,011 arrests. These are the cities of North Carolina:
1925	Arrests
1920	Arrest for	Per
Population	Drunkenness	10,000
Durham ............. 21,719	742	353
Gastonia ........... 12,871	129	108
Rocky Mount......... 12,742	162	135
Wilmington ......... 33,372	220	70
Winston-Salem ...... 48,395	513	107
129,099	1,766	136
Hence the wets contend that the liquor question has not been finally settled in North Carolina, even after twenty years of experimenting.1
Dawson Purdy comparing arrests for intoxication in North Carolina and New York City.APPROPRIATION S AND CONVICTIONS 159
The animal reports of the Department of Internal Revenue shed further light on the subject of Prohibition in the state of North Carolina. Since 1920 the following sums of money have been spent by the Prohibition unit in an endeavor to enforce the law in that state:
Amount Spent for Enforcement by the U. S. Prohibition Unit in North Carolina
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
$6,917.36
14,094.44
155,299.65
187,958.80
169,051.96
195,981.47
348,915.88
A still more significant table herewith attached shows the convictions for crimes arising in North Carolina wholly from the illegal traffic in alcoholic beverages.
The rate per 100,000 population of convictions for illegal selling of alcoholic beverages from 1898-99 to 1913-14 were as follows :
Rate of Convictions by the Office of the Attorney General for Selling Intoxicating Liquor in North Carolina
Year	For Retailing	For selling to Minors	For selling on Sunday
1898-99	27.06	1.66	1.76
1899-1900	28.35	2.27	0.73
1900-01	34.80	1.97	1.03
1901-02	39.51	0.15	1.02
1902-03	35.16	0.45	0.75
1903-04	41.36	1.18	2.17
1904-05	50.92	0.82	0.53
1905-06	58.71	0.24	0.81
1906-07	50.08	0.99	0.28
1907-08	61.89	0.60	0.04
1908-09	69.01	0.18	0.13160 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
State Prohibition
Year	For Retailing	For selling to Minors	For selling on Sunday
1909-10	61.14	0	0.09
1910-11	57.01	0.35	0.04
1911-12	70.00	0.08	0.04
1912-13	78.36	• «	
1913-14	80.17	• •	
Since 1914 only one item has been reported. The rates of convictions for selling intoxicating liquor have gone up, as follows:
Rates of Convictions by the Office of the Attorney General for Selling Intoxicating Liquors in North Carolina Per 100,000 Population
1914-	15
1915-	16
1916-	17
1917-	18
1918-	19
1919-	20
1920-	21
1921-	22
1922-	23
1923-	24
1924-	25
1925-	26
63.12
58.02
61.06
40.86
40.05
49.35
61.67
76.20
103.30
160.05
163.77
177.81
These rates indicate a decided upward trend from 1920 to 1924. Since then the reaction seems to have slowed down somewhat.
Evidence of Increased Violations of Law
Furthermore, data taken from the annual reports of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue show the paraphernalia confiscated, property seized and other items reflecting the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment in that state byPROHIBITION NOT AT ITS BEST 161
the Prohibition Unit, which is working independently of the State authorities. It is over and above the efforts put forth by the State enforcement agencies and reported, in part, by the Attorney General, also the various police departments.
In analyzing these data it is important to bear in mind that State Prohibition really became effective in 1909 in North Carolina. From 1898 to 1914 the rate of convictions on the charge of retailing alcoholic liquors increased from 27 per hundred thousand population to 80. The maximum in the pre-prohibition period was recorded in 1908 with a rate of 69. It decreased in the first two years of State Prohibition. After that, it rose to 80 in 1914. Since 1915 the charge has been changed, and convictions for selling intoxicating liquors, which were 63 per hundred thousand population in 1915, diminishing to the low rate of 40 in 1918-1919, reached the unprecedented high level of 177 in 1926, the last year for which data are available.
The tables in this chapter would indicate—judging from this data alone—that so far as North Carolina is concerned, Prohibition is, if not still at its worst, at least as yet not at its best.
Dby View
In any study of the development of the State of North Carolina, three names must be taken into consideration—Charles B. Aycock, Walter Hines163 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOEST
STATEMENT OF NUMBER OF ARRESTS, SEIZURES, ETC., BY FEDERAL PROHIBITION DIRECTORS AND BY GENERAL PROHIBITION AGENTS, IN THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
(Fiscal Year Ends June 30)
	1918	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926
Illicit Distilleries									
& Distilling Apparatus Seized:									
Distilleries....	814§	1,534§	3,104§	2,287	1,400	1,393	780	839	1,884
Stills		753	1,473	3,104	1,551 941	166	154	960	1,917	753
Still Worms...					192	177	224	'686	586
Fermenters...						14,334	12,933	11,881	11,731	18,340	16,843
Spirits Seized Wine Gallons..	293	463	4,796	8,528	7,353	14,871	13,768	18,272	18,856
Malt Liquors Seized—In 1,000 W. G....				1,204	1,174	1,113	1,068	1,512	1,721
Wine Seized									
W. G		1,240		50			3,910	3,827	4,907	3,701
Cider Seized									
W.G									3,665	1,159	3,721	300
Mash Seized					442,747f				
W. G.					30,396$		16,569	10,164	300,400	339,917
Pomace Seized									
w G 							28,886 174	8,277 133	22,420 219	9,310 216
Autos Seized.... Value of Autos					60				
									
RAlKAfl							$53,129 $467,278	$34,287 $421,932	$70,520 $758,860	$69,111 $649,125*
Property Seized & Destroyed... Property Seized & not Destroyed Total Persons	$8,339$	124,689$	$283,152$	$461,869$	$356,756 $60,542				
						$60,213	$72,289	$76,883	$49,292*
									
				1,036	659	867	662	1,231	1,056*
									
* Sept., 1925 to June 30,1926.
iWme, Cider, Mash and Pomace.
Property Seized.
$ Seizures.
SOURCE: Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue.POLICY A DETERMINING FACTOR 163
Page, and “Buck” Duke. The first two, with others who co-operated, are in a large part responsible for the revolution in education which has taken place in North Carolina. The latter is responsible for a great deal of the prosperity of the State. His dream came true, and the hydroelectric development, representing an investment of several hundred million dollars, has had a great deal to do with the economic development of the State.
But just a few individuals cannot remake a state, except with the consent and aid of the rest of the citizens. While giving full credit to these men who have done so much for education and for the economic development, one cannot study the history of the last quarter of a century of the Tar Heel State without realizing that the prohibition policy not only has been a contributing factor, but a determining factor, in this new development.
Dry Majority Approves Results
It is quite true that prohibition in North Carolina has not solved the liquor question to-day entirely. Louis Craves made a survey of the prohibition situation in the State after North Carolina had been dry for over a decade, and this is his appraisal of the situation, in an article in the World’s Work published a few years ago. He begins with this paragraph:164 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
There is no prohibition issue in North Carolina. The affair is settled. If a vote were taken on the question to-day the dry majority would be far greater than it was when the wets and drys lined up against each other for their state-wide fight in 1908.
He outlines the evolution of the prohibition movement in North Carolina as follows :
State-wide prohibition came in 1908. The law, however, permitted druggists to sell whiskey by prescription and did not prevent shipments into the state. In 1913 sale by druggists was forbidden. The striking fact in connection with this measure was that it was enacted in response to two petitions of a sort not expected in such a cause. One came from the druggists’ association, in resentment at the discredit brought upon their trade by a few men who were growing rich by acting as bootleggers. The other came from the State Medical Association, which adopted a resolution declaring its belief that alcohol was not necessary in medical practice and should not be sold in drug-stores.
The so-called Quart Law went through in 1915. This limited to one quart every fifteen days the amount of liquor that might be brought into the state by one person. It may easily be imagined to what abuses this privilege was open. People ordered for one another ; fictitious names were used freely ; and the same man could have many quart packages sent to him in many different towns.MORAL REVOLUTION IN A COUNTY 165
The New York politician who voted gravestones to pile up a needed majority was a tyro beside the North Carolina drinkers and sellers of drink who set out to beat the Quart Law.
The Eeed Amendment, when introduced in Congress as part of an appropriation bill, was a wet move. Senator Eeed was a wet, and this proposal of his was meant to embarrass the drys by making prohibition detestable. By forbidding the shipment of liquor into dry states it superseded North Carolina’s Quart Law. It was soon followed by war-time prohibition and then by the coming into effect of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Thus prohibition in North Carolina was a gradual growth.
Improvement of Gaston County
The Department of Eural Economics and Sociology of the University of North Carolina sends students into different districts to make special intensive surveys of certain counties. In a survey on Gaston County, made in 1920 by this department, and published by the university, the following paragraphs describe the moral revolution which has come about in that particular county. Mr. S. H. Hobbs, Jr., reports:
The experience of Gaston County has been unique. It was first the banner whiskey county of North Carolina, and now it is the banner cotton-mill county. The cotton mill166 PBOHIBITIOU STILL AT ITS WOBST
completely displaced the distillery in less than thirty years or so.
During the decade from 1878 to 1888, the period of greatest activity in the distillery business, the county saw a comparatively slow development in the textile industry, only four mills being erected during this ten-year period. The seven-year period from 1888 to 1895, the years that witnessed the first big decline in the number of distilleries (eight ceasing operation during this period), gives us an entirely different story to relate. During these seven years, while the distilleries were decreasing by eight in number, the total number of cotton mills constructed was twenty. The conclusion to be drawn from the above figures is that as the manufacture of whiskey declined, the interest centered in it was shifted over to the textile business, with the result as mentioned above.
In 1900 the population was 27,903, the valuation of taxable property was $5,166,129, the cotton mills reached thirty or more in number, and the number of distilleries was reduced to sixteen.
The year 1903 saw a great victory for the prohibitionists of Gaston. The law passed in that year “prohibited the manufacture and sale of liquors in Gaston County.” Wine was still allowed to be manufactured, while whiskey could only be secured by prescription of a qualified physician.
The five-year period following the passage of the first prohibition law witnessed remarkable growth in Gaston County along all lines.EMERGED FROM THE SHADOW
167
The population of the county increased to 36,000 in 1908, the valuation of taxable property amounted to $10,000,000, and the sum of $35,782 was expended for educational purposes.
The death blow to the shipment of whiskey into Gaston was dealt in 1915. By a special act of the Legislature a law was enforced for Gaston County alone. This law forbade even the shipment of two quarts per month, the amount still allowed in the State, within the boundaries of the county. Since 1915, it has been illegal to ship any amount of liquor into the county.
It has been during the last twenty-five years, the period during which the liquor business has been abolished in Gaston, that the cotton-mill industry has assumed its present proportions. Gaston County has emerged from the shadow of the liquor evil into the greatest textile county in the South, without any loss of efficiency by her industrial workers. On the contrary, increased efficiency has come through prohibition.
The fact that, as interest in the manufacture of whiskey declined, the interest in the manufacture of cotton was stimulated is proved by the history of the decline of the former and the development of the latter.
The survey of Gaston County by the University of North Carolina is so interesting that I have been anxious to find out if the progress of that county has continued, or whether a reaction168 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
against prohibition has come in after ten, fifteen, or twenty years which would nullify the good effects previously reported by Mr. Hobbs. The expenditures for public school purposes in this county in five-year periods were as follows:
Year	Expenditures
1900 ..................................$14,468.55
1905 .................................. 25,959.67
1910 .................................. 42,207.30
1915 ..................-..............105,892.37
1920	................................327,912.41
1921	................................684,738.21
1922	................................126,723.44
1923	............................... 578,034.09
1924	................................981,646.09
This county, which twenty years ago lost the whiskey industry, is now one of the wealthiest in the State. Gastonia, the county seat, with a population of 22,000, boasts of five banks with about ten million dollars in deposits, 42 cotton mills with 570,775 spindles, a daily mill payroll of $17,555, a mill capitalization of over $16,000,000, turning out manufactured products aggregating in value over $26,000,000.
So far as Gastonia and Gaston County are concerned, evidently the ten-year period of grace allotted by the Moderation League to prohibition has somehow managed to drag over a period of twenty years. To-day this former center of the whiskey distilling industry is thriving and prospering under prohibition, and there are no mourners bewailing the passing of liquor.TRUE FOR THE WHOLE STATE
169
Phenomenal Statewide Progress
An analysis of the statistical reports from all over the state indicate that the phenomenal progress and the gain in economic well-being in Gastonia and Gaston County are true to a certain extent for the whole state. North Carolina’s property is estimated to be valued, in 1928, at over $5,000,-000,000. In 1900 the property value was 681,000,-000, in 1910 $1,685,000,000, in 1926 $4,543,000,000 and over five billions of dollars at the present time. For the year ending June 30, 1927, North Carolina paid for Federal Taxes to the United States Government $205,684,000. This amount was exceeded by only three states—New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
The bank resources of $150,000,000 in 1914 grew to over $500,000,000 by 1926. This small state, with a population of about 2,897,000 in 1927, spent $35,-000,000 on public schools in 1926. Thirty-four per cent of this amount was for new schools—leading the United States in the latter, with New York second.
The development of the highways has been equally phenomenal. North Carolina has over 7,000 miles of state highways. In the last five years, ending in 1926, it spent about $125,000,000 on highways alone.
In 1900 some $68,000,000 were invested in the industry of the state. These investments grew to170 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
$217,000,000 by 1910, $669,000,000 in 1920, and the recent estimates are that the capital invested in industry in the state exceeds one billion dollars. Last year North Carolina paid out in wages over $134,000,000 to the 182,000 wage earners. The state leads all other southern states in values added to raw materials manufactured. Here is a list of the leading southern states and their relative rank compared with North Carolina:
North Carolina...............$499,727,125
Texas ....................... 392,808,607
Maryland .................... 357,660,398
Virginia .................... 274,199,597
Georgia ..................... 249,501,036
This small state ranks	fifth in the United States
in water power development. In the southern states it ranks second in output of power plants, with 1,730,861,590 kilowatt hours, and second in output by water power with 1,025,278,570 kilowatt hours.
Apparently the havoc which has been promised the farmer under the prohibition regime has not come	to North Carolina.	In	1927 the	state
ranked fourth in value per acre of 22 important farm crops in the United States ($45.43); sixth in total value of the same ($314,596,000). In this it surpassed the great northern states of New York ($200,197,000), Pennsylvania ($214,212,000), Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. It was exceeded only by Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois and Kansas. The official rank of the North Caro-AN INDEX OP DETERMINATION 171
lina crops in the United States in 1927 is as follows:
1st in tobacco
2nd in peanuts, soy beans, sweet potatoes, early Irish potatoes 3rd in cow peas and cucumbers 5th in sorghum cane for syrup 6th in green peas, snap beans for table 7th in lettuce and cotton (lint alone).
The forest products of the state are valued at about $100,000,000 annually. North Carolina leads all the states in the per cent of debt-free homes. More than four-fifths of its home-owners have no debt thereon. North Carolina has the highest birth rate of any state. At the last census it showed that three-tenths of one per cent within its borders were foreign born.
If North Carolina shows a great number of prosecutions of liquor cases, it is rather an index of the determination of the people to enforce this law than a sign of general lawlessness and breakdown of Prohibition.
It is stated by an eyewitness, that he sat in the police court of Winston-Salem during 1925, studying the enforcement machinery of the state. A defendant was brought in by policemen, the charge was “Transportation of Liquor.” It developed that the prosecuting attorney, in order to make a strong case, wanted to show that the liquor had not only been possessed but also transported.172 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Testimony was to the effect that a gallon jug of peach brandy was in the car at the time of the arrest. The motor was not running. The automobile was at a gas station. The lawyer for the defense brought out through witnesses—employees of the gas station—that the motor was not running at the time of the arrest and that the owner of the car and booze was merely behind the wheel and while being pushed by two colored boys he steered the car to the gas tank. This the defendant admitted. The Court was satisfied that as the automobile was in motion when the arrest took place, the policeman was justified in the charge of “Transportation of Liquor.” The car was forfeited, the fine was $250.00 and no one happier than the defendant who got away so easily.
If public opinion in the States of New York, Maryland and Connecticut were aroused so as to demand, not to say anything about tolerating such strict enforcement, these latter states which have either failed to ratify or attempted to nullify the Eighteenth Amendment, would have a different story to tell.
Records of Decreased Mortality
It is somewhat difficult to report statistical data on mortality for North Carolina which would have any great significance, because the figures available barely reach back to 1910 instead of goingA REDUCED DEATH RATE
173
back to at least 1900, and give a period of time in the pre-prohibition era to be of any significance.
From the United States Census Bureau, the following data on mortality have been gleaned, both white and colored, from all causes, and rates of deaths due to alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver. The accompanying series of graphs illustrate the situation in North Carolina compared with the United States as a whole, and with the State of Connecticut, which I have taken as an example of a wet state (See Page 174):
In 1910, the general mortality rate in North Carolina was higher than in the rest of the United States or in Connecticut. This was two years after state Prohibition had become effective. In 1926, the death rate was but a trifle lower than in the United States but still somewhat higher than in Connecticut. For some years, however, the death rate in North Carolina has been below the death rate of Connecticut and even of the United States. This is true for 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and in 1923 the rate for North Carolina was the same as for Connecticut. Since then the North Carolina rate has increased somewhat. The death rate of the white population, however, shows uniformly to be smaller in North Carolina than in Connecticut with exception of but two years, 1910 and 1914. For most of the time, the white rate of North Carolina is even below that of the United States as a whole.Rer i.ooo population	Per too.ooo population
174 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
UNITED STATES NORTH CAROLINA CONNECTICUT
MORTALITY FROM ALCOHOLISM
TOTAL MORTALITY AND MORTALITY FROM CERTAIN CAUSESA COMPARISON WITH CONNECTICUT 175
Total Death Rates and Rates for White and Colored Population in the United States, North Carolina and Connecticut
(Rate per 1,000 Population.)
Year	Tota 1 Mortality Rates			Rates White Pop.			Rates Colored		Pop.
	u. a	N. O.	Conn.	U. S.	N. C.	Conn.	U.S.	N. C.	Conn.
1910	14.7	18.6	15.6	14,5	15.8	15.5	21.9	23.7	23.6
1911	13.9	18.2	15.3	13.6	14.4	15.1	21.6	25.2	24.0
1912	13.6	17.1	14.7	13.3	14.2	14.6	20.7	22.3	19.7
1913	13.9	16.5	14.7	13.5	13.5	14.6	20.5	22.1	20.5
1914	13.5	19.0	14.8	13.1	15.4	14.6	20.5	25.7	22.7
1915	13.3	17.3	14.5	12.9	13.6	14.4	20.5	24.3	21.0
1916	13.9	12.9	15.8	13.5	11.1	15.6	19.2	16.8	22.7
1917	14.1	13.8	15.9	13.6	11.9	15.6	20.5	17.8	28.1
1918	18.0	17.1	20.4	17.3	14.5	20.2	25.7	23.0	32.9
1919	12.8	12.2	13.3	12.3	10.5	13.2	17.9	15.9	22.3
1920	13.0	12.7	13.6	12.5	11.2	13.4	17.7	16.0	22.6
1921	11.6	11.3	11.4	11.2	9.9	11.3	15.8	14.4	18.6
1922	11.8	11.6	12.0	11.4	10.3	11.9	15.6	14.8	18.2
1923	12.3	12.0	12.0	11.8	10.5	11.9	17.0	15.5	18.6
1924	11.8	12.2	11.3	11.2	10.4	11.2	17.0	16.4	18.1
1925	11.8	11.6	11.2	11.2	9.9	11.1	18.0	15.5	18.6
1926	12.2	12.1	11.4	11.6	10.4	11.3	18.5	16.3	18.8
While Connecticut and the United States show a great drop in the rate for mortality from alcoholism, the drop in North Carolina began in 1914, or five or six years after state Prohibition had become effective.
Since 1920 there has been an increase for the United States and Connecticut which has not reached the pre-prohibition level. The reaction in North Carolina is less than one-half that for the United States and for Connecticut. In the death rates from cirrhosis of the liver with but slight fluctuations, the decrease for North Carolina has been constant. For the United States, it has been somewhat static since 1920. For Connecticut the rate has shown a reaction since 1920, with a de-176 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
cided drop in 1924. Since then the curve has been somewhat static.
Death Rates from Alcoholism and Cirrhosis of the Diver in the United States, North Carolina and Connecticut (Rate per 100,000 Population.)
Year	Hat» for Alcoholism	Hates for Cirrhosis of Liver
	U.S.	N. C.	Conn.	U. S.	N. C.	Conn.
1910	5.5	2.8	7.7	13.3	9.9	14.4
1911	4.8	2.4	6.6	13.6	8.2	14.4
1912	5.3	4.1	7.7	13.1	7.9	12.2
1913	6.0	2.7	8.6	12.9	8.7	12.1
1914	5.0	3.8	4.9	12.5	5.7	13.7
1915	4.4	2.3	5.7	12.2	8.2	11.5
1916	5.7	1.3	8.2	11.9	4.8	11.7
1917	5.2	0.9	9.6	11.0	4.1	11.0
1918	2.7	0.5	5.2	9.5	4.4	10.7
1919	1.6	0.8	1.8	7.9	3.3	9.3
1920	1.0	1.0	1.0	7.1	3.7	6,7
1921	1.8	1.3	1.6	7.4	3.9	7.0
1922	2.6	1.0	1.9	7.5	4.1	7.6
1923	3.3	0.9	3.9	7.2	3.7	7.5
1924	3.2	1.5	4.2	7.4	3.4	5.9
1925	3.6	1.6	3.7	7.3	3.6	6.2
1926	3.9	1.8	4.2	7.2	3.3	6.1
Fatalities from Automobiles in the United States, North Carolina and
Connecticut
United States Data	North Carolina Data	Connecticut Data
Year	Cars Regia-	Persons	Auto	Cars Regis-	Persons	Auto	Cara Regis-	Persons	Auto
	tered	Per Car	Fatali-	tered	Per Car	Fatali-	tered	Per Car Fatali-	
			ties per			ties per	V '		ties per
			100,000			100,000			100,000
			Pop.			Pop.			Pop.
1910...	468,500	196.31		2,018	1,093.80	• • •		• • » •	mm*
1911...	639,500	145.97	• • •	1,686	1,329.52	• • •		« * • •	
1912...	944,000	100.34	• « «	2,402	947.90	• • •		• • • *	m m m
1913...	1,258,062	76,38		10,000	231.21	• • •	23,200	51.49	• mm
1914...	1,711,339	56.95	• • ♦	14,677	159.94	• • •	27,786	43.95	• • ■
1915...	2,445,666	40.41	5.9	21,000	113.46	3.3	41,121	30.34	8.4
1916...	3,512,996	28.53	7.3	33,904	71.32	2.2	56,048	22.73	13.3
1917...	4,983,340	20.38	9.0	55,950	43.85	2.7	74.645	17.43	14.6
1918...	6,146,617	16.75	9.3	72,313	34.41	3.2	86,067	15.42	13.7
1919...	7,565.446	13.79	9.4	109,017	23.15	4.1	102,410	13.22	15.1
1920...	9,231,941	11.45	10.4	140,860	18.17	5.2	119,134	11.59	15.6
1921...	10,463,295	10.23	11.5	148,627	17.45	5.3	134,141	10.49	15.5
1922...	12.238,375	8.86	12.5	182,550	14.40	6.4	150,977	9.37	14.9
1923...	15,092,177	7.28	14.9	246,812	10.80	9.6	181,748	8.03	16.9
1924...	17,591,981	6.32	15.7	302,232	8.93	12.0	217,227	6.84	18.4
1925...	19,954,347	5.64	17.0	341,126	8.02	13.4	250,669	6.04	21.6
1926...	22.001,393	5.18	17.9	384,619	7.20	15.9	263,235	5.85	19.1
1927...	23,127,315	4.99	• • *	434,200	6.46	• • •	281,521	5.56	• • •
1928...		« • «	e e •	#»••••	• • •	• • •	• • • • • e	...	• • •CURVE OF MOTOR CAR DEATHS
177
While the fatalities have increased and are still on the increase in North Carolina, the data show that the increase is as yet decidedly below the curve of automobile fatalities for the whole United States and for Connecticut.
AUTOMOBILE FATALITIES IN THE UNITED STATES. NORTH CAROLINA AND CONNECTICUT178 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
One significant table made from data received from the Board of Health of North Carolina shows the tremendous decrease in mortality from tuberculosis. The death rates have dropped from 139.3 in 1914 and 156.4 in 1915 to 101 in 1921, and the low point of 89.0 in 1925. There has been an increase during 1926, when the rate reached 96.8. However, since 1922, it has always been below 100 per 100,000.
The birth rate for the state has remained more or less constant; from 31.2 in 1914 it fluctuated, reaching a maximum of 33.4 during 1915 and during 1921. During the last few years it has been 31.9 in 1924, 29.7 in 1925, and 28.8 in 1926. This is the lowest in the period. The previous low point was in 1919 when the rate was 29.3.
The subjoined table gives the admissions of patients to two State Hospitals for the Insane in North Carolina, where the probable cause of admission was recorded as being due to alcoholism. The admissions to the Morgantown Hospital go back far enough to be of some significance. The average yearly admission from 1900 to 1905 was a little over three patients. From 1906 to 1910, a little over 3. During the subsequent five years, the average was 9. It dropped then to an average of a little over 2 from 1916 to 1920 and has averaged 2 during the years 1921 to 1924.FEWER INSANE PATIENTS
179
Admissions	of Patients to	Two State Hospitals		FOR THE
	Insane, North Carolina			
	Morgantown State Hospital1		Dix State Hospital?	
Year	Total	Alcoholic	Total	Alcoholic
	Admission	Insanity	Admission	Insanity
1900 ..		 123	4		
1901 ..		 132	2		
1902 ..		 119	2		
1903 ..		 262	3		
1904 ..		 282	2		
1905 ..		 218	8		
1906 ..			 195	4		
1907 ..		 203	2		
1908 ..		 226	2		
1909 ..		 203	3		
1910 ..	........ 337	5		
1911 ..		 311	13		
1912 ..		 237	10	233	28
1913 ..		 186	7	275	14
1914 ..		 162	5	538	29
1915 ..		 366	10	318	26
1916 ..	........ 296	3	275	15
1917 ..		 304	2	203	4
1918 ..				 274	4	196	3
1919 ..		 385	1	244	6
1920 ..				 338	1	192	4
1921 ..	........ 369	3	300	3
1922 ..		 304	1	374	13
1923 ..		 436	2	430	23
1924 ..	........ 454	2	486	25
Source: Dr. John McCampbell, Supt., State Hospital, Morgantown, N. C.
2Source: Hospital Records of Admission.CHAPTER Xn
IN A TYPICALLY WET STATE?
Connecticut is chosen as a typically wet State in which to test the working of National Prohibition, first, because it failed to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, although it did pass a concurrent law upholding the Volstead Act which is still in force; second, Connecticut is a typical eastern industrial State. In its cities the American stock has been submerged by the wave of immigration from Italy, the Balkans, Russia and Poland. This more recent element has long been accustomed to the unrestricted use of alcoholic stimulants and is proficient in the home manufacture of wine, beer, vodka and other distilled liquors. Third, Canadian liquor reaches Connecticut, and its coast is well adapted to smuggling. Fourth, during the entire period of National Prohibition the press of Connecticut has actively opposed the application of the Volstead Act, and the prevailingly wet sentiment of the State is influenced by its contiguity to metropolitan New York.
The material for this chapter was secured from Ralph H. White of New Haven, and the tables which Mr. White prepared have been verified by actuaries of the Phoenix Life Insurance Company.
180A REVOLT IN TIME OF PEACE
181
Wet View
Representative wets of Connecticut have no disposition to deny the social and material benefits that came to Connecticut when alcoholic consumption was curtailed under the Food Conservation Act of 1917, but they remind the prohibitionists that it was a war measure, and that the people were sympathetic towards its enforcement and observance.
The wets feel that the people would not have forgotten the lessons learned during the war, and that they would have willingly submitted to the continuance of liquor restriction, and thus more of these advantages would have been retained than are enjoyed to-day.
But they feel that the effort to make these benefits permanent by the Eighteenth Amendment was foredoomed to failure. People who will loyally submit to restriction in their personal and private habits in time of war will revolt against sudden and absolute prohibitive regulations in time of peace.
State Opinion Rejects Prohibition
It is the wet attitude, therefore, that in National Prohibition there have been moral losses that cannot be presented in tables and the surrender of personal and civic liberty that cannot be measured by percentages. Connecticut did not desire either182 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
National or State Prohibition. Its Senators and Representatives over a long period of time have almost invariably fought every step that led toward Federal interference by prohibitory law with the habits of its citizens. There has been a constantly growing resentment against the enforcement of the law and an increasing disregard of its injunctions by the “best” elements.
Tale University, by a vote of its faculty and students, expressed its hostility to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act by a vote of four to one. The heads in important offices of the great insurance companies in Hartford are almost to a man personally opposed to it. So great is the bitterness of Connecticut’s leading citizens that many of them who never used intoxicants or allowed them in their homes now use them and serve them; not so much because they have changed their views regarding alcohol, but as an outspoken protest against the restriction of their social rights.
The youth of Connecticut have been quick to follow the example of their elders, and ostentatiously and defiantly drink in public places. Otherwise dangerous and ill-tasting intoxicating beverages have a sweet and forbidden flavor to them. There are residential sections of the elite where liquor refreshments are invariably present at social occasions and where the drinking of such refreshments is a test of class loyalty.HOSTILITY OF THE JUDGES
183
While it is hard to bay good wine, Connecticut is making its own and steadily building up the supply for future years. It is rapidly becoming a state of home brewers. The carefully prepared malt extract with the yeast cake added and directions exactly followed makes a full-strength beer, and the refrigerators of the rich and poor alike are said to be well filled. The bootlegger’s prices are high and the quality of his goods not so good, but Connecticut’s citizens are willing to pay for it because it is the “price of liberty.” As a consequence there are scenes of revelry and debauchery in homes that once were respectable.
Drunken driving, as shown by the increasing number of arrests, is apparently on the increase and it leaves behind it a trail of dead and wounded victims. The law is not enforced and will not be enforced. The legal profession in Connecticut on the whole is bitterly opposed to both the State and the National Prohibitory Law. The hostility naturally appears in the prosecutor and the judge. Flagrant cases of violation are poorly prepared and inadequately presented against a bootlegger with whom the prosecuting attorney is in sympathy and who is, perhaps, his customer.
Hostile Courts and Juries
The judge is often hostile to the law. If he were not so, he would hardly have been recommended by the political organization of his district184 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
for his office. But if a court attempts a strict interpretation of the law, juries will not convict. Connecticut’s judges have large discretionary powers, and the State’s liquor laws establish no minimum penalties. One would not get even a suggestion of the penalties that the statute provides by reading a hundred consecutive decisions. A judge in an important Connecticut court has expressed himself openly as being unwilling to enforce a law that is contrary to public sentiment. A prosecuting attorney in the Superior Court resigned his office because he was “unwilling to get down into the dirt to enforce the liquor law.” An important conspiracy liquor case in the Federal Court has loitered for nearly two years in the process of being tried. It involved enormous graft figures and betrayal of trust, but so easy is it to bring up technical and elaborate demurrers that the probability of final decision in this case is remote.
The liquor law has opened a fruitful field for the shyster lawyer. What the court does not assess in fines, the bootleg lawyer collects as a retainer for the next offense. Fees of hundreds and even thousands of dollars displace the jail penalties. The rule is to “make him pay all you can.” The heavy penalties provided in the law are simply used to frighten the client and extort his money.
Bootlegging is not wide open and rampant, butCONNECTICUT’S SYSTEM OF GRAFT 185
Connecticut has developed a system of graft displacing the license fees that formerly went into the State Treasury. This varies, of course, according to the locality. The policeman on the beat must be taken care of, then the police organization, next the politicians that control the police organization. The same sequence follows with the State police and those who control it. After that the Federal graft must be paid out. If an official is not venal, somebody collects it in his name. It is simply impossible for any man to make money by violating a statute without paying directly or indirectly for the privilege.
A Demoralizing Business
When the official grafters are through with the man his neighbors prey upon him under threat of informing the authorities and if the bootlegger still has money left, he has yet to deal with the professional blackmailer, the “hi-jacker” and the “stick-up” man. The demoralization of the business reaches everywhere. Banks that have always had a respectable clientele must deal with bootleggers or lose important and lucrative business to their competitors. Young men who are trying to keep the narrow road of honest, lawful business see men of inferior attainments growing rich in the bootlegging game and are tempted) beyond their powers to resist to follow their example. Young men are working their way through college186 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
driving rum trucks and consider their lawless doings adventures.
Hence the wets hold that Connecticut has been placed on the wrong track and is headed for the abyss. Its people , cannot avoid these evils by a stricter enforcement of the law because they cannot change themselves or public opinion.
It is absolutely necessary for the future security and welfare of the State that somehow a better respect for law be secured. Fearless, upright men must be put into public office and Connecticut’s courts must be above reproach, but such attainments are impossible when the State’s political parties secure their campaign funds from law violators. Under these conditions, good men cannot receive nomination if they were willing to accept office. The only men who could reform the courts are unwilling to assume office when they know they will be surrounded with an atmosphere polluted with perjury and conspiracy; while they will be helpless to correct these conditions because jurors, who simply reflect public opinion, will not convict. For these reasons the prohibitory law is regarded as a wall built across the road of progress.
Dry View
"When Prohibition came to Connecticut it was followed by marked changes in the death rate, commitments for alcoholic insanity, automobileMARKED CHANGE FOR THE BETTER 187
deaths, crime rates, high school attendance and other features of the State’s social life. The results shown are from the official vital statistics of Connecticut and its reports of jails, State hospitals for the insane, the Department of Education, and the Automobile Commissioner. Actual figures are presented covering twenty years in these departments, with trends and contrasts.
It should be stated that other influences besides Prohibition, such as improved social agencies, education and greater prosperity have helped reduce the death rate and improve social conditions in Connecticut during this period. But they seem inadequate explanations without Prohibition, for the results have come in so short a time and with such pronounced contrasts that they can hardly be attributed to influences that were steadily at work during the whole period.
Reduction in the Death Rate
In considering the tables presented in this chapter, three distinct periods are noted: first, the period of the saloon, 1908-1916—since war restrictions of the sale of liquor did not take effect until September, 1917, and the larger proportion of that year belongs to the pre-prohibition period ; second, the period of transition, 1917-1919; and, third, the period under National Prohibition, 1920-1927.
Regarding the period of the last nine years of188 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the saloon, there was no tendency toward reduction in the death rate of Connecticut. It remained fairly constant at an average of 15.3 per 1,000 population. Yet during this period many agencies were at work and steadily increasing in efficiency in life-saving year by year. The last three years of this period were marked by increasing prosperity due to the war orders received by Connecticut’s munition and other industries, which ran at full capacity. A higher standard of living for the working majority should have resulted in a reduced death rate.
Connecticut’s death rate during these three prosperous years actually rose. It was a period of unprecedented alcoholic dissipation. Products from the State’s breweries increased 100 per cent, and releases from its distilleries increased 25 per cent, as shown by the Federal figures, and commitments for drunkenness in Connecticut’s jails rose from 5,124 in 1915 to 7,314 in 1917. Also, tuberculosis increased, deaths from pneumonia rose one-fourth, and deaths by accidents jumped one-half.
Transition Period, 1917-1919
During the years of transition Prohibition became gradually effective with war-time restrictions on the sale of alcoholic beverages. These were followed by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, and its ratification by forty-DECREASED DEATHS AND DISEASE 189
six of forty-eight states; later, by the Volstead Act, effective in January, 1920, and, finally, by the Connecticut enforcement code early in 1921.
Death rates during this period were distorted by the influenza epidemic of 1918, which accounts for nearly eight thousand deaths, one-third of the total deaths in Connecticut. Normal figures cannot be estimated by eliminating deaths from influenza, because many might have died of other ailments. Also, the death rate for 1919 was lower than it would otherwise have been, due to the preceding epidemic.
Death Bate in Prohibition Years, 1920-1921
The death rate fell in 1921 to 11.4 per 1,000, and has maintained an average of 11.6 per 1,000 of population. There has been a gain of 5,000 lives a year due to the difference between the Prohibition and pre-Prohibition rates. That is, 50,000 people of Connecticut are now living who would have died under the conditions of the pre-Prohibition era. The decrease is conspicuous in preventable diseases and in deaths from diseases that are usually associated with alcoholic consumption.
The Food Conservation Act, which restricted the sale of liquor, became effective September, 1917. By comparing 1917, the last partly wet year, with 1921, the first legally dry year in Connecticut, these changes became manifest, since the190 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
death, rates for these are fairly representative, being close to the average for each period.
The Connecticut death rate from tuberculosis for the period 1920-1927, was about 60 per cent of the rate in 1908-1916; from pneumonia, about 70 per cent, and from accidental deaths about 75 per cent. Deaths from alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver were less than one-half, and infant mortality four-fifths of the former rates. Commitments to the Connecticut State hospitals for the insane of patients suffering from alcoholic insanity were less than one-third the former rate.
Virtually identical results are found in comparing the average death rates from these causes for the two entire periods.
Since these changes came about during the years of transition, it is apparent that the chief cause of improvement in Connecticut’s death rates emerged during that time, and not before or since then. There is no evidence that other favorable influences that have been steadily active in saving life during the past twenty years were relatively more effective during those three critical years than during any other three years.
In Connecticut there has been an increasing trickle of illicit liquor since Prohibition, possibly enough to counterbalance the increasing efficiency in life-saving of the health, educational and social service agencies, but not enough to increase the death rate. The increase in alcoholic consump-AN ACCESSION OP PEOSPEEITY 191
tion cannot be so large or so toxic as the foes of Prohibition assert.
Indirect Benefits
In Connecticut, Prohibition diverted into legitimate channels of trade sums of money formerly wasted in alcoholic dissipation. Bridgeport has, perhaps, the most diversified industries in the country, its 50,000 wage earners producing some 5,000 commodities. Waterbury, the brass city, nearly as large as Bridgeport, is diversified in its mechanical production. Meriden, with its silverware and cutlery, employs skilled mechanics almost exclusively. Hartford is the insurance center of the United States with thirty-eight home companies, and has large typewriter factories. New Haven, the seat of Yale University, is also the center of New Haven Railroad system, employing thousands of clerks, besides being a headquarters for manufacture of firearms, hardware and clocks. New Britain is one of the leading metal goods cities of the country. Manchester is a silk center. Stamford produces yearly forty million dollars’ worth of manufactured articles. Danbury is a hat city and Bristol, a rapidly developing city, makes machine tools.
Into this busy State, Prohibition has done its share in bringing orders for useful products to supply new demands from all over the country. If it has been found that the more the alcohol user192 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
drinks the fewer are his wants, and the less he produces, the reverse has been true in Connecticut since the emancipation from the saloon; as its people are benefited by increased demands of a saloonless nation. Along with this has come an increased efficiency and productivity. For Connecticut, Prohibition came opportunely. It stemmed the outgoing tide of prosperity that followed the cancellation of war orders, and raised it to a new high level, with an increased standard of living.
Statistical Exhibit—Connecticut
Alcohol is the ally of tuberculosis. The addict has a low power of resistance.
Almost no progress was made in combatting tuberculosis in Connecticut during the last ten years of open sale of alcoholic beverages. It began to fall during the transition period, and has gone down steadily ever since. The lowest rate was reached in 1927, less than half of the pre-Prohibition rate.
Death Bate Fbom Tubebculosis in Connecticut (per 10,000 Population)
1908			15.5
1909			15.7
1910			15.0
1911			15.0
1912			14.2
1913			14.1TUBEBCULOSIS AND PNEUMONIA 193
1914			14.6
1915			14.1
1916			14.4
1917			15.3
1918			14.6
1919			11.7
1920			11.8
1921			 9.6
1922			11.4
1923			 8.9
1924			 8.1
1925			 7.5
1926			 7.8
1927			 6.7
	# # # * #
As in the ease of tuberculosis, the alcoholic addict is peculiarly subject to pneumonia. The death rate from this disease in Connecticut shows a steady increase during the whole wet period; a fall during the transition period, except in 1918, the year of the influenza epidemic. During Prohibition it has declined steadily until 1927, when the rate was half that during the close of the wet period.
Death Eate Peom Pneumonia in Connecticut
(Bate per 10,000 Population)
1908			13.2
1909			14.6
1910			15.9
1911			15.2
1912			15.2194 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
1913	..................15.8
1914	..................15.8
1915	..................15.6
1916	..................19.8
1917	..................19.7
1918	..................21.3
1919	..................11.1
1920	..................15.0
1921	.................. 9.7
1922	..................12.2
1923	..................12.7
1924	..................10.2
1925	..................10.9
1926	..................10.9
1927	.................. 8.5
4L	JL	JL	Mr
W	7P	^
The death rate from Alcoholism and Cirrhosis of the Liver during the period of National Prohibition is half what it was during the wet period. The death rate rose after the “new broom” period of National Prohibition, but not nearly to the pre-Prohibition level, and again declined after 1923.
Death Rate from Alcoholism and Cirrhosis of the Liver in Connecticut
(per 100,000 Population)
1908			17.1
1909			19.6
1910			19.6
1911			22.1
1912			22.8
1913			23.6
1914			18.3DEATH EATE TABLES
195
1915			17.5
1916			18.3
1917			19.4
1918			14.8
1919			12.0
1920			 8.9
1921			 8.5
1922			 9.5
1923			11.2
1924			10.9
1925			10.6
1926		
1927		
Jfc
W	'Jr	7r	IT	w	TT	*3?
The trend of the tables of deaths by accident conforms to the preceding tables. It shows a fairly constant rate during the wet period, with an upward turn during the last three years of that period, and a sudden drop of 30 per cent during the transition period to a new low level, which has been maintained. These figures are remarkable in that they include automobile deaths, which have steadily risen in number because of increased use of motor vehicles. They also include homicides.
Accidental Deaths in Connecticut
(per 10,000	Population)
1908			11.6
1909			....11.6
1910			9.7
"‘Not available.196 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOKST
1911			 8.6
1912			 8.2
1913			 9.0
1914			 8.3
1915			 7.6
1916........		10.0
1917			10.7
1918			 8.8
1919			 7.2
1920			 7.4
1921			 7.3
1922			 7.3
1923			 7.5
1924			 7.4
1925			 7.5
1926					 7.3
1927.				 6.9
# # #	AL *7t* W TP
Contrary to the general opinion, an automobile passenger takes about one-half the risk of being killed that he took before Prohibition. The number of motor vehicles licensed in Connecticut have more than trebled since 1916. If the 1916 rate had prevailed, the number for 1927 would have been 936 instead of which it was 356.
So far as automobile accidents are due to chance alone they increase in a faster ratio than the increase in cars; for example, when the cars in a community are increased three times in number, the number of times two cars pass each other is increased nine times. Of course, the human element enters, so that increased danger is offsetTHE MODERATE DRINKING DRIVER 197
among sober drivers by increased skill and caution. It is the moderate-drinking driver who takes the chances. With the records thus showing a falling automobile risk of fatality, charges that drunken motor-car driving is proportionally increasing seem to be grossly exaggerated.
Deaths fbom Automobile Accidents in Connecticut
(per 10,000 Registrations) 1910....................20.1
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926 .1927
12.1
20.7
20.7 21.2
24.7
31.3 26.2
22.5
20.4
17.0
16.6
14.1
14.7
13.4
13.4 12.0 11.9
4Ê?	«V*	4£-	42.	-Jfe
w W W T? *3? W W
Alcoholic insanity had increased by five-eighths during the first seven years of the pre-Prohibi-tion period, as reckoned from the number of such198 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
cases committed to the State Hospitals for the Insane. During the three years of existence of the State Farm for Inebriates, opened as a branch of the Norwich State Hospital for the Insane in 1916, the more hopeful cases of alcoholic insanity were sent there; only on this account the records show apparent falling off during 1916 and 1917. Normally the rate of alcoholic insanity would have risen together with the jail sentences for drunkenness.
Since 1921, all alcoholic insanity cases have been sent to the insane hospitals, and during the past three years the rate has shown a tendency to rise. But it is still about one-third of the actual rate in 1917.
Commitments fob Alcoholic Insanity to the Connecticut State Hospital fob the Insane
(per 10,000 Population)
1908			80
1909			 1.02
1910			99
1911			 1.05
1912			 1.02
1913			 1.24
1914			 1.26
1915			 1.30
1916			 1.28
1917			 1.04
1918			74
1919			33
1920			32GROWING HIGH SCHOOL ATTENDANCE 199
1921	....................42
1922	....................28
1923	....................26
1924	....................31
1925	....................40
1926	....................53
Commitments for Alcoholic Insanity to State Farm for Inebriates*
1916	.....................46
1917	.................. 1.80
1918	................... .71
# * # * # # #
High School attendance in Connecticut has increased during the entire twenty years covered by this table, but after Prohibition it grew by leaps and bounds. In absolute numbers it increased twice as fast during the last seven years as it did during the preceding thirteen years.
Increased Size of High School Graduating Classes in Connecticut
(per 10,000 Population)
1908			12.5
1909			12.9
1910			13.8
1911			13.9
1912			15.5
1913			17.1
1914			17.5
1915			20.3
♦As estimated, one-third had alcoholic psychosis.200 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
1916	............20.4
1917	............22.5
1918	............22.1
1919	............22.2
1920	............22.7
1921	............25.5
1922	............25.6
1923	............30.1
1924	............33.9
1925	............39.2
1926	............40.4
1927	............42.4
**##*##
During the saloon period, the table shows a steady rise in the rate of jail offenses; when the wet prosperity came in 1915-1917, the rate rose rapidly, especially in commitments for drunkenness, breach of the peace and assault, which constitute about two-thirds of jail offenses. During the transition period, the total of jail commitments fell to about two-sevenths of the former rate, and even then half of the prisoners were in jail for offenses allied with drunkenness. But for liquor, Connecticut’s jails would he nearly empty.
Prisoners in County Jails of Connecticut,
All Offenses
(per 10,000 Population)
1909	................. 95
1910	................. 94
1911	................. 96NO RETURN TO OLD CONDITIONS 201
1912			 96
1913			 95
1914			103
1915			103
1916			112
1917			115
1918			 88
1919			 54
1920			 32
1921			 41
1922			 40
1923			 46
1924			 62
1925			 64
1926			 64
1927			 66
JL X JL Tf W W	# # # #
It is true that Connecticut has been unable wholly to retain the gain made during the first “new broom” years of National Prohibition. But the State has not returned to the old conditions. Jail commitments for all offenses are a little more than one-half of what they were in the wet years, while commitments for drunkenness, breach of the peace and assault are somewhat less than one-half of the commitments during the last years under license. In Connecticut the old-time tramp is almost extinct, commitments for vagrancy having shrunk five-sixths.CHAPTER XHI
IN THE NATION’S CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOL?
Wet View
Mr. Hugh. F. Fox, Secretary of the United States Brewers’ Association, estimates in The Periscope for April, 1927, the annual consumption of alcohol in the United States. Observing that nobody knows what it is, and that the “wildest guesses, therefore, can be made with impunity,” Mr. Fox says:
Perhaps the wildest of all of these guesses is that of Professor Irving Fisher (“Prohibition At Its Worst,” Page 44) : “It seems safe to conclude that the total consumption to-day is certainly less than 16 per cent of pre-prohibition consumption, probably less than 10 per cent, and possibly less than five per cent.”
As basis for his comparisons, Mr. Fox goes back to June 30, 1918, “prior to any Federal restrictions upon the consumption of alcoholic beverages.” He then publishes a table of which the last column gives the estimated consumption by the nation in terms of absolute alcohol on a per
202MALT EXTRACT BASE REJECTED
203
capita basis. From this table he deduces conclusions as follows:
If this is approximately correct, it means that the net result of National Prohibition has been to more than double the beverage use of spirits, treble the wine consumption, and eliminate two-thirds of the former consumption of malt liquors. No attempt has been made to estimate the consumption of apple-jack and hard cider.
Mr. Fox notes the estimate of home-brewed malt liquors made by The American Brewer, at 28,-000,000 barrels of “home brew,” figured on the basis of malt extract production in 1925. This was 483,000,000 pounds, of which 10 per cent is allowed for the baking trade. As it fails to allow for the “very uncertain factor of the amount of malt extract which is used for other than brewing purposes, such, for instance, as distilling,” Mr. Fox rejects this total as excessive. His own estimate is worked out on the basis of the hop crop.
Bases Estimate on Hop Crop
As “probably 99 per cent of all hops find their way into the beer kettle,” Mr. Fox says, and as the 1925 crop was harvested in September, he uses it for calculation of all malt beverages produced during the fiscal year ended June 30, 1926, together with the stock of hops carried over from the previous season. To this he adds hop imports204 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1926, and the supplies carried over by retail stores and cereal beverage manufacturers. From the total available supply of about 41,000,000 pounds, he deducts exports, cereal beverage production, and the quantity used for other than brewing purposes, arriving at a balance of 22,020,214 pounds. This he allocates to the illicit beer made for commercial purposes and the beer made in private families, allowing three-quarters of a pound of hops to the barrel.
By adding an estimated 3,000,000 gallons of smuggled beer, the estimate amounts to 910,168,-835 gallons, or a little over one-third the 1918 consumption of malt liquors.
Mr. Fox estimates that the consumption of wine has trebled during National Prohibition. He says:
Apart from the fact that grapes can easily be converted into wine, the method of home wine-making is simplified by the concentrated grape juice extracts which are put up by a number of enterprising wineries. .	.	.
Home-brewing and home-distilling are both illegal, but by a significant provision in the Prohibition Regulations, individuals are expressly permitted to make two hundred gallons of “non-intoxicating fruit juices” for their own use.
Prior to 1919, Mr. Fox finds that the wine-grape acreage of California was 97,000 acres; in 1926,ESTIMATE OF WINE FROM GRAPES 205
it Rad grown to 680,796 acres, of which 174,374 acres were in wine grapes, 151,393 acres in table grapes, and 354,828 acres in raisin grapes. For the United States as a whole, carload shipments of grapes increased from 41,310 cars in 1920 to 80,421 cars in 1925. The shipments of the 1925 California crop totaled 85,858 cars, of which, he says, 80 per cent were juice grapes and 20 per cent were table grapes.
Allowing 50 per cent for the table use of table grapes from California and of the grape crop from all other States, Mr. Fox finds that juice grapes, table grapes, small fruits and berries, home-grown grapes, dandelions, rhubarb, and so on, together with wines removed from bond for medicinal and sacramental purposes and imported or smuggled, amounted to 156,602,247 gallons.
Adopts Buckner Figures as Basis
After modifying somewhat the estimate of Emory R. Buckner, former United States District Attorney at New York City, that 60,000,000 gallons of industrial alcohol were diverted to illegitimate uses in 1925, Mr. Fox adopts it as a base —notwithstanding the fact that these figures were later reduced to 34,000,000 gallons by Mr. Buckner in a memorandum to the Senate Committee, and Dr. J. M. Doran, then Chief Chemist of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, estimated the diversion for beverage purposes at from thirteen to206 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
fifteen million gallons. Mr. Fox comments on the steady annual increase of industrial alcohol production, rising from 3,084,950 proof gallons in 1907, to 93,762,422 gallons in 1917, until after the war it slumped to 45,640,948 gallons in 1920. He adds:
After that, something happened; at any rate, the amount of ethyl alcohol withdrawn for dénaturation reached the huge total of 191,670,107 proof gallons in 1926.
After the advent of Prohibition, there developed thirty special denaturing plants. According to the testimony of General Andrews on April 6,1926, before the U. S. Senate Committee, these thirty plants “are nothing more or less than bootlegging organizations, because they give opportunities for diversion.”
Taking this evidence and the fact of considerable diversion by ostensible vendors of industrial alcohol who cater to bootleggers, together with the fact that the Executive Secretary of the Industrial Alcohol Manufacturers’ Association estimates that the industry represents an investment of nearly half a billion dollars, Mr. Fox concludes that it “seems reasonable to compute the diversion of denatured alcohol to beverage purposes at 50,000,000 gallons a year.”
Then there is “moonshine” liquor. The Prohibition Unit has adopted the policy of ignoring home production entirely, and General AndrewsESTIMATE OP BEVERAGES CONSUMED 207
has testified that his agents “have very little contact with the class of people that individually make small quantities of alcohol in the house, barn or garage, and peddle it.” From a reckoning of the major seizures of stills, Mr. Fox estimates that their gross capacity is 110,430 gallons. Putting the number of small stills of ten-gallon capacity per week at 200,000, he arrives at an estimated home production of 104,000,000 gallons of whiskey. To this he adds an estimate of 20,000,000 gallons of smuggled liquor a year; 588,954 gallons diverted from medicinal use, and 75,553,400 proof gallons of commercial moonshine.
Thus the total consumption of distilled spirits for the year ended June 30, 1926, is placed at 251,142,354 proof gallons.
A Post-Prohibition Increase
Mr. Fox arrives at a grand total of 1,317,913,386 gallons of malt liquors, wines and distilled spirits consumed during that fiscal year. That is 11.97 gallons per capita; it represents an increase from 1918 of 1.04 gallons of proof alcohol per capita to 1.61 gallons in 1926.
Criticizing the Fisher estimate of a reduction of absolute alcohol consumption in 1926 to certainly less than 16 per cent of pre-prohibition consumption, and the Corradini estimate of 3.09 per cent of pre-prohibition consumption, Messrs. Dar-208 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
row and Yarros assert in their book “The Prohibition Mania”:
Two rather important sources of illicit consumption of alcohol are completely overlooked by Professor Fisher, as well as by Mr. Corradini—first, the amount diverted not from industrial alcohol, but from medicinal, and, second, the amount diverted from the wines withdrawn on permit for sacramental purposes.
These authors then quote Dr. A. D. Bevan, Chairman of the Council of the American Medical Association, that “more than 99 out of every 100 prescriptions written for a pint of whiskey are bootlegging prescriptions,” and the Department of Research and Education of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, that it “is clear that the legitimate demand does not increase 800,000 gallons in two years; it is probably safe to say that not more than one-quarter of this wine is sacramental—the rest is sacrilegious.”
Dby View
The estimate of alcoholic consumption for the nation made by the Secretary of the United States Brewers’ Association does not pretend to be more than a shrewd guess. But it is neither shrewd nor convincing. Mr. Fox adopts the reckoning of industrial alcohol diversion made byGRAPE IMPORTS AND EXPORTS
209
former United States Attorney Buckner, unheeding the fact that Mr. Buckner later cut his estimate almost in two ; and he rejects the official calculation of Dr. Doran of the Treasury Department, which cut the Buckner figures by three-quarters.
Overlooks Grape Exports
Furthermore, in estimating the wine crop, Mr. Fox has altogether overlooked the great growth during the years of National Prohibition in exports of grapes from the United States. The Department of Commerce records exports of fresh grapes from a quantity so negligible that up to 1922 they were not even listed; in 1922 grape exports amounted to 172,649 pounds; during the following years of National Prohibition grape exports grew until during the year ended June 30, 1928, they amounted to 38,819,310 pounds.
During nearly the same period grape imports shrank from 32,651,045 pounds in 1923, to only 3,470,769 pounds in 1928.
Exports of raisins leaped from 24,492,455 pounds in 1921, to 49,639,114 pounds in 1922, and to 193,098,517 pounds in 1928; while imports of raisins fell from 43,268,689 pounds in 1921, to but 1,817,196 pounds in 1928.
So we find during National Prohibition a revolutionary change in the status of the grape crop whereby the native growers supplanted foreign210 PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
growers in supplying the normal domestic market for fresh grapes and raisins, thus accounting in large measure for the increase of our grape production for legitimate purposes. Moreover, while the production of raisins doubled, from 732,000 short tons in 1920, to 1,443,000 short tons in 1927, and table grapes more than doubled—from 163,-000 short tons to 348,000 short tons during the same period—wine grapes increased from 375,000 short tons in 1920, to only 473,000 short tons in 1927. Yet Mr. Fox allowed only 50 per cent of the grape crop for all other use and 50 per cent of the total production to wine-making.
Grape Growers’ Advertising Campaign
In addition, millions of dollars have been spent in a national advertising campaign conducted by the grape growers, stimulating the sales of their product to consumers as an ideal food in the making of raisin bread and as seedless raisins, a substitute for confectionery; as grape juice, and as a fresh fruit. In 1915, before National Prohibition, wine grapes constituted more than half of the nation’s grape crop; in 1927, on the other hand, of the total crop of 2,264,000 short tons, wine grapes had been proportionally reduced to slightly over one-fifth, while raisins accounted for half the crop. It is a matter of record that since 1915 the output of table and raisin grapes has grown out of all proportion, while the production of wineDATA POUND TO BE FAULTY
211
grapes has remained static, or, during certain years, has actually decreased.
It would appear, therefore, that in the categories of wines and spirits, on which Mr. Fox founds his statements that alcoholic consumption has slightly increased over 1918, prior to National Prohibition, his data are exceedingly faulty. It should be borne in mind, also, that 1918 belongs to the period of wartime restrictions of alcohol, and that as compared with 1916, the last year that is comparable—1917 was occupied by many in storing up supplies of beverages against threatened wartime prohibition—alcoholic consumption had been cut considerably. Thus, of distilled spirits, 140 million proof gallons were taken from bond in 1916, as compared with only 89,000,000 proof gallons in 1918. The consumption of malt liquors did not shrink so much, since it amounted to 1,818,000,000 gallons in 1916, and 1,500,000,000 gallons in 1918. But the efforts of the Food Controller to conserve the crop for war purposes accomplished a considerable reduction in alcoholic beverages consumed, and Mr. Fox’s estimate of a per capita increase of consumption during National Prohibition would not hold, if his faulty figures were compared with 1916.
Not Everybody Can Afford Liquor
The estimate of reduced alcoholic consumption made in “Prohibition At Its Worst” aroused212 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
criticism and ridicule, but no facts have been adduced to confute it. The impression of large consumption is due to ignorance of “how the other half lives.” It should be borne in mind that 99 per cent of all incomes of people in the United States are less than $9,000 a year, and that 80 per cent are under $1,500. These income factors, combined with the high price of drinks, must of necessity confine the custom of drinking “as much as before National Prohibition, or more” to a narrowly restricted income class, and for the most part within • the ten per cent of the population whose incomes range from $2,100 upward. The rest of the nation simply cannot afford the trebled and greater prices of alcoholic beverages. Those in the upper group see “everybody drinking”; they are subject to the same illusion as that of the summer secretary in the New York financial district who remarked that “everybody had gone to Newport for a vacation.”
In the present book Dr. Doran, now Commissioner of Prohibition, makes a special statement for our chapter on smuggling and illegal diversion, that the new policy of allocating and limiting primary production of alcohol to reasonably ascertained legitimate ends has resulted in further progressive curtailment of illegal diversion.
The present chief domestic sources of illegal supply, Dr. Doran says, are spirits from raw ma-INDEPENDENT ESTIMATE BY FELDMAN 213
terial, such as grain and sugars, and these are captured in much smaller illegal units than formerly. Hence the estimate of 1926, that the total consumption was certainly less than 16 per cent of pre-prohibition consumption, probably less than 10 per cent, and possibly less than five per cent, has acquired in 1928 a new “factor of safety” by reason of the cutting off of illicit diversion of industrial alcohol at the source.
An independent estimate by Dr. Herman Feldman of Dartmouth College in “Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects,” further shows the likelihood of a tremendous reduction in the amount of beverage alcohol now consumed. Dr. Feldman calculates that the 150,000 saloons of 1913 dispensed some 2,240,000,000 gallons of wines and beers. Prohibition wiped out the saloons, it wiped out that entire volume of drinking. “By no statistical legerdemain,” Dr. Feldman says, “can the total supplied by bootleggers be made to come within a fraction of the former consumption.”
Figures Stand Unimpeached
Professor Albert Levitt, formerly Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, notes in Current History for April, 1928, that “in spite of a scathing attack upon him by Clarence Darrow in his book, ‘The Prohibition Mania,’ Professor Fisher’s figures stand sub-214 PBOHIBITIOF STILL AT ITS WOBST
stantially unimpeaehed. ’ ’ After dismissing Mr. Fox’s estimate and reviewing that made by Dr. Feldman, Professor Levitt concludes:
The saloons have been wiped out. The number of distilleries, wineries and breweries which are permitted lawfully to manufacture alcoholic liquors has been reduced to a very small fraction of the number that existed before prohibition came. There has not been an increase in illicit manufacturing of liquor to bring the total production of liquor up to an appreciable fraction of what that production was ten years ago. The number of persons who drink alcoholic liquors has been very greatly reduced since prohibition came. Obedience to the prohibition law is general throughout the country, and this obedience is sincere.
The single allegation of fact made by Messrs. Darrow and Yarros, that the Fisher and Corra-dini estimates in 1926 took no account of illegal diversions from medicinal and sacramental purposes, is incorrect. These estimates comprised all legally used alcohol, including sacramental wines and medicinal alcohol, as well as illegal alcohol.
Bases Estimate on Seized Bootleg Samples
The quantitative estimate made by Mr. Robert E. Corradini, Research Secretary and Statistician of the World League Against Alcoholism, isSEIZED BEVERAGES USED AS BASE 315
based on tlie assumption that the samples of illicit beverages seized by the Treasury Department represent a true cross-section of the liquors on the market, of which the legal portion is known. Treasury officials have declared that his estimate involves a margin of error of not more than 10 per cent. Mr. Corradini says:
We have taken the consumption of distilled spirits, comprising whiskey, rum, gin, brandy and others; also, the possible diversion of industrial alcohol, used chiefly by druggists and manufacturers of proprietary medicines, and the amount of denatured alcohol which may have been diverted illicitly for beverage purposes. We have also analyzed the exports of the potable spirits from Canada, both of Canadian products and of foreign products exported through Canada. We have analyzed exports of spirits from the British Isles and particularly the trade with the islands contiguous to the United States, known as the West Indies and the Bahamas. In estimating the probable amount of consumption of alcohol, we are reporting the total quantity of spirits withdrawn legally and those used for medicinal purposes during Prohibition. This we have done on the assumption that the toxic effect of alcohol is none the less deleterious because of the fact that its consumption is legalized.
The laboratories of the Chemical Section report the chemical tests made in their investigations. From their reports, we have216 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
studied their work done on behalf of the Prohibition Unit. They show the analysis of almost 20,000 samples of illicit beverages seized during 1925. During 1924, over 21,000 such analyses are reported, and 24,744 for the year 1923.
The study of the analyses of this laboratory work may furnish perhaps a clue to the real situation. In 1920, of the 9,000 analyses made, 34.8 per cent were of fermented beverages ; 25.7 per cent related to distilled spirits, 38.0 per cent were of medicinal preparations (non-beverage) and 1.47 per cent of denatured alcohol concoctions. For the years 1923, 1924, and 1925, the respective percentages of samples analyzed were, in their chronological order, as follows:
	1923	1924	1925
	Per cent	Per cent	Per cent
Fermented beverages		. no data	6.0	11.2
Distilled spirits		18.0	23.3	29.9
Whiskey 		no data	0.8	0.7
Medicinal preparations..	11.8	8.3	8.3
Denatured alcohol		64.2	56.2	47.4
Mr. Corradini States His Formula
These analyses of over 75,000 samples for the four years for which Mr. Corradini has information would show that in 1920, the quantities of illicit alcoholic beverages were in the following order: medicinal preparations, fermented beverages, distilled spirits, denatured alcohol. In 1923, the order was : denatured alcohol, distilled spirits, medicinal preparations, fermented beverages. In 1925, as in 1924, denatured alcohol again rankedA RATIO OP ILLICIT DIVERSION
ail
first, distilled spirits came second, fermented beverages third, and medicinal preparations fourth. In estimating the probable consumption of these beverages since Prohibition for which there can be no official figures, Mr. Corradini states the following formula:
We have assumed that the ratio of illicit diversion of distilled spirits has been the same for industrial and denatured alcohol as for distilled spirits; also, that all spirits withdrawn legally have been consumed. We believe that the 75,000 analyses represent a fair average of the product on the market for each year throughout the country. .	.	.
In the subjoined table we have attempted to give what seems to us to be the probable amount of absolute alcohol consumed for beverage purposes during the years 1900 to 1925, inclusive. To this is added an index based on the consumption during the year 1916.
We found it physically impossible to adduce sufficient data on cider to command the attention of the student. We have therefore been compelled to drop this factor altogether. From 1900 to 1918, with the single exception of 1917, we consumed more absolute alcohol in beers than in distilled spirits. Though the difference is slight, beer alcoholism was a more important factor than alcoholism due to the ingestion of distilled spirits.
Now Corrected For Toxicity But Mr. Corradini now includes a strong modi-218 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
fying factor, which was necessarily omitted from the estimates of 1926, namely, that of toxicity of bootleg liquors and the increased poisonous qualities of ethyl alcohol when taken in concentrated form as spirits, irregularly, and in excessive and lethal quantities. This may serve to reconcile in the minds of those who are still incredulous, certain apparent contradictions that are manifest in their own experience or observation, in the statement that the quantities of absolute alcohol now consumed are from one-twelfth to one thirty-third of the pre-prohibition quantities.
In “Prohibition at Its Worst” it is noted that the ratio of toxicity of bootleg liquors to that of medicinal liquors dispensed by government permit was being worked out under the auspices of the Federal Prohibition authorities. These authorities have not yet published the results of the investigation. But we understand that while bootleg liquors are not so poisonous in ingredients, other than ethyl alcohol, as was at first generally supposed, the proportionately greater bootlegging of distilled spirits, with their high alcoholic content, and the fact that while they are drunk at wider intervals and more irregularly than formerly, the drinkers try to make up for lost time by consuming them in larger amounts when they do drink, have made them during National Prohibition from five to twenty times more toxie, in a progressive degree up to 1926.A HIGH KATE OF TOXICITY
219
It is highly probable, therefore, that at present it requires in the gross supply only a twentieth of the amount of bootleg liquor, as imbibed, as of pre-prohibition liquor to produce a given number of cases of drunkenness.
This is a high ratio of toxicity. But in the occasional, irregular and excessive drinking now practiced, the system acquires no powers of tolerance; none of the organs except the liver have power to oxidize the alcohol ingested or to mitigate the severity of the blow it gives to the brain and nervous centers. Dr. Alexander 0. Gettler analyzes this enhanced effect in his report published in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine for June, 1928.
New Corrector for Toxicity
Mr. Corradini’s new chart of per capita consumption of absolute alcohol in the United States introduces his new corrector for toxicity of bootleg alcohol. In its distinctions for toxicity of malt and spirituous liquors it derives largely from studies of European investigators, notably Ga-brielsson, Miliet and Olbrecht. The co-efficient of toxicity is taken from the report of Gfabrielsson’s work by Dr. A. Koller. The “poison curve” index is given with the index of consumption of absolute alcohol, both based on consumption in 1916, the last full “wet” year in the United States. The table follows:220 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
CONSUMPTION OP ABSOLUTE ALCOHOL IN THE UNITED STATES
	Index of	Index Cor-
	Actual Con-	rected For
	sumption	Toxicity
Year	1916—100	1916—100
1925 			 3.2	14.4
1924 			 3.5	15.2
1923 			 5.3	23.5
1922 			 5.5	22.0
1921 			 12.5	39.9
1920 			 26.7	42.8
1919 			55.3	57.4
1918 			 76.5	71.8
1917 			110.4	113.9
1916 			100.0	100.0
1915 			98.8	98.1
1914 			108.1	105.9
1913 			109.1	107.8
1912 			103.8	102.3
1911 			105.1	103.0
1910 			 99.9	98.3
1909 			93.3	91.1
1908 			96.0	93.6
1907 			100.4	100.9
1906 			 92.7	92.2
1905 			 84.9	85.3
1904 			 84.7	85.5
1903 .....		81.7	82.6
1902 			 77.7	77.7
1901 			70.9	72.0
1900 			68.1	68.6
Thus the index of actual consumption of absolute alcohol is found, in 1925, to be 3.2 per cent of consumption in 1916; while the index corrected for toxicity is equivalent to 14.4 per cent of consumption in 1916.CONSUMPTION OP ABSOLUTE ALCOHOL 221
Index. Numbers 1916 * ido
1900 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 H ‘12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 "21 ’22 23 2A '25
CONSUMPTION OF ABSOLUTE ALCOHOL IN THE UNITED STATESCHAPTER XIV IN PUBLIC SENTIMENT?
Wet View
Beaction marked by failure and repeal characterized two great waves of State-wide prohibition from 1846 to 1858, and from 1867 to 1889. The Moderation League, Inc., of New York, gives the results in its pamphlet, “Prohibition in the 1928 Campaign.” Twelve of the original thirteen States to adopt statutory Prohibition abandoned it, leaving only Maine. It lasted an average of 7.9 years in Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and New York; in New Hampshire the prohibition term extended from 1855 to 1903, and in Vermont from 1852 to 1903. In the eighties Rhode Island, Kansas, Iowa, and North and South Dakota experimented with it and repealed it, several of them more than once; while North Dakota alone failed to repeal it. The average term of prohibition for these States, barring North Dakota, was 7.3 years.
What is regarded as a minor wave occurred in the South from 1907 to 1912, abolishing the saloon in Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia, but,
%%%PEAK OF PROHIBITION SENTIMENT 223
in five of these States permitting importation for personal use. This movement was alleged to be motivated largely by the race problem. Alabama abandoned it after three years, but the remainder of this group persisted into the period of national Prohibition.
During the third major wave five States adopted Prohibition in 1914, and twenty-two States followed them in rapid succession to the period of national Prohibition, when forty-six out of forty-eight States ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, through their legislatures.
Hysteria Produced National Prohibition?
The Moderation League ascribes the third major wave to the excitement of the war. “The hysterical armistice election was undoubtedly the peak of prohibition sentiment of the third wave,” the League says ; and, before January 17,1919, the State legislatures had been caught in it. “If the present third prohibition wave is going to follow the first two,” the statement continues, “the limitation of time which we have observed, during which they can maintain themselves, will have expired by 1928. Consequently, political leaders are nervously watching all the signs to learn, if possible, whether history is repeating itself.”
Then there is the Canadian prohibition wave, a minor flow and ebb of sentiment. “Five provinces adopted it by popular vote and then abandoned it,224: PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
also by popular vote, as follows: Alberta (1915-
1923)	, Manitoba (1916-1923), Saskatchewan (1916-
1924)	, British Columbia (1916-1924), and Ontario (1919-1926).
“Its average life in these provinces was 7.6 years. This contemporaneous experience in Canada is in entire harmony with our own experience during the first and second waves, and is some evidence that the present third wave is going the way of the first two.”
Further evidence of present reaction is found in the State referenda of recent years. In the 1926 referenda, New York State rolled up a wet majority of over a million votes—three to one— on the proposal to petition Congress for modification of the Volstead Act permitting “beverages which are not in fact intoxicating” as determined by each State. In Illinois the proposal would have allowed saloons, and put no specific limit on alcoholic content, and the campaign was dropped by the wets as well as by the drys. Yet it was carried by a wet vote of 60.2 per cent, as compared with a 67.6 per cent wet vote in 1922, when the question was restricted to the permission of light wines and 4 per cent beer for home consumption.
Wisconsin voted wet by two to one on the question whether Congress should modify the Volstead Act to permit 2.75 per cent beer without saloons. Colorado’s dry vote of two to one inWET GAINS IN STATE REFERENDA 225
1918 was reduced in 1926 to about three to two (154,672 to 107,749) on the proposal to amend the State Constitution authorizing the legislature to provide for State sale and control of liquors when, and if, made permissible under Federal law; nineteen Colorado counties formerly dry turned wet. Nevada voted wet three to one on the proposal to ask that Congress call a constitutional convention to modify the Eighteenth Amendment; this reversed Nevada’s dry vote of more than four to three. In California the wets came within 3 per cent of the votes necessary to repeal the State enforcement act. Missouri voted dry by 294,388 to 599,931, but here the wet leaders repudiated the proposal to repeal not only the State enforcement act, but virtually all the other State liquor laws, leaving the State without any control over liquor. The Montana dry majority of 1916 shifted to a wet majority, repealing the State enforcement act and all other State liquor laws except that prohibiting sale to minors. In its conclusions the Moderation League states:
Wet Prospects in Light of Popular Votes
Analysis of the 1926 referenda, with reference to the prior votes, shows a very marked shift of opinion away from bone-dryness, and toward some form of moisture. When considering their prospects for 1928, the parties will consider that:
1. In the first two United States prohibi-226 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
tion waves, the dry majorities changed to wet majorities within a decade.
2.	The contemporaneous prohibition wave in Canada has already imitated the first two United States prohibition waves by subsiding within a decade.
3.	The foreign countries which also adopted prohibition coincidentally with the World War have practically all abandoned it already.
4.	The 1926 referenda show that the same shift in opinion has been taking place in this country.
5.	Election day in November, 1928, will mark the tenth anniversary of the peak of the prohibition wave (November 5, 1918) in this country.
This indicates that any party which places its reliance in 1928 on the former dry majorities, is almost sure to be disillusioned.
The fundamental fact, and one which may be the final consideration in the political mind, is this:
The wet States include most of the large States with large blocks of electoral votes— and many of them are not merely wet, but so overwhelmingly wet that the result in such States is likely to turn solely on the prohibition question.
As to the dry States, it is doubtful whether more than a handful still have bone-dry majorities—and those majorities have been reduced to such small proportions that it is not likely that the result in many such States will be determined by . . . prohibition. . . .AN ENEMY IN DEY MAJOEITIES 227
Resting its hopes on the “ebbing wave” theory of Prohibition, the Association Opposed to the Prohibition Amendment called for a campaign fund, November 19, 1927, of $3,000,000 to urge a national prohibition referendum at Washington and to reach the voters of all the States, asking their expressions thereon. The Association sought in the 1928 platforms of both major parties a declaration that would favor a referendum “in conscience binding” on all subsequent Democratic and Republican nominees for the United States Senate and House. Failing this, the Association contemplates a referendum in half a dozen or more States at recurring elections during the next few years, until all the States shall have been heard from.
Dby View
The active enemy of the wets is the dry majority in Congress and in the State legislatures. Their passive and even more formidable enemy is the apparent indifference of the wets that makes the dry majorities more impressive and the steady absorption of the electorate in pursuits that are more attractive than drink. Because of the unaccountable voting apathy to wet propaganda, Senator Bruce of Maryland, among other wet leaders,, advised carrying the fight into the Presidential election of 1928. “We must do this,” Senator Bruce said, “for the sake of the cumulative228 PKOHIBITIOF STILL AT ITS WOEST
effect on the public mind between now and the convention. We can never win this fight except in a Presidential campaign, for at no other time are the voters sufficiently interested to make a real fight. The Democrats must have a wet candidate and a wet platform in which they will declare in so many words for a modification of the law along the lines suggested by the New York referendum.”
Governor Smith As Wei Champion
Senator Bruce’s advice has been taken at least in part. The National Democratic Party now has its wet Presidential candidate on a law enforcement platform, which he has modified by a postconvention plank of his own, precisely on the lines advocated by the Maryland Senator. Moreover, Governor Smith has secured the appointment of a Director of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment as Democratic National Chairman, who, in his acceptance address, stressed the prohibition issue and pictured the Democratic Presidential nominee as the Moses who might point the way out of conditions that have followed in the wake of prohibition. “Governor Smith,” National Chairman Raskob says, “as President of these United States, with all the resources at his command, will be able to give the people of the United States a picture of the real social conditions under the present so-called prohibi-PUBLICITY GENERALSHIP
229
tion laws. If, as a result of careful study, he can evolve a plan for the regulation and control of the liquor question in a way that will abso-hitely prevent the return of the saloon, eliminate bootlegging, with its accompanying evils—graft, corruption and murder—and restore temperate life in our country, then all fair-minded men must admit his right, if not his duty as President, to promulgate such plan, and to advocate such changes in our laws and Constitution as may be necessary for its adoption. This again is leadership—not pussyfooting.”
Thus the coveted attention of the American public has been gained to the prohibition issue. Chairman Baskob resigned from his chairmanship of the finance committee of General Motors in order to urge the issue, and Pierre S. du Pont, Chairman of General Motors Board of Directors, obtained leave of absence from the corporation for the same purpose. For the first time since the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment it has become a major political issue in a Presidential election.
National Prohibition came as a nonpartisan measure by an overwhelming majority of Congress and the almost unanimous ratification of the States. The responsibility for making it a partisan issue is lodged directly in the post-nomination pronouncements of the Democratic Presidential candidate and his Chairman, chosen from the di-230 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
rectorale of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Chairman Baskob promises to help “relieve the country of the damnable affliction of Prohibition.”
Record of Dry Majorities, State and Congressional
Since national Prohibition became effective in 1920, all attempts in the separate State and Congressional campaigns to elect United States Senators and Bepresentatives and legislators have failed to constitute working wet majorities. Volumes of wet talk and agitation have not thus far issued into effective action. William Atherton Du Puy reviews the successive State and Congressional votes in Success Magazine for February, 1927 :
Admittedly, if men voted as they talked, Prohibition would cease to exist. But the record shows that voters, in the solemn quiet of the balloting booth, express opinions at variance with those aired on the street corner. Men do not vote as they drink, some very solemn person has said, but as they pray. Election returns show that something like this actually happens.
The record follows :
The first overwhelming demonstration of the vote-getting strength of the Prohibition movement came with the ratifying by the States back in 1919 of the constitutionalOUTPOURING OP IDEALISM
231
amendment providing for it. The legislatures of 46 out of 48 States, both Senate and House in each case, voted for approval. But two States, Bhode Island and Connecticut, failed to act. No other such overwhelming ratification of a constitutional amendment has ever occurred. Wet Wisconsin and sopping Maryland gave their approval. Ninety-five per cent of State legislatures, under mandate from their voters, ratified the dry amendment. The other five per cent merely failed to act.
The wets interpreted this overwhelming ratification as an outpouring of idealism engendered by the war. They expected a reaction. The Congress of the United States would, of course, temper this order. It was the one body which expressed the political will of the whole nation. The people, of course, were not actually for Prohibition. Listen to the way they talked. Offer them a nip of your prewar stock.
Since that time four Congresses have been elected. Each has been drier than its predecessor. In each questions have arisen which necessitated the separation of the dry sheep from the wet goats. The drys have gained steadily in numerical strength. They have never lost a battle of ballots in the Congress. The high tide of wet votes in Congress of late has been 20 per cent, the low tide 10 per cent.
This last election marked the most desperate, last trench fighting that the wets have yet piade. Their heavy artillery preparation for232 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
it had lasted for a year. Congressional investigating committees had lent themselves as agencies of propaganda. Crime waves had been cited as evidences of the impossibility of enforcement. The mission to be accomplished was the recovery of 200 seats in the House. The wets were determined to accomplish that end. They put all they had into the effort. But when the smoke had cleared away the drys had gained two Congressmen. The wets had actually gained one Senator. They had elected a mere six Senators out of 35, but that showing, poor as it was, was a gain. It did little, however, to offset a six to one majority in both Houses. And this is the one body which registers the national attitude on such questions.
State feeling likewise was recorded in this last election. Thirty-five Governors had been elected. Of these 30 were outspoken in their dryness. There were but two, Smith, of New York, and Ritchie, of Maryland, who were frankly wets. Zimmerman, of Wisconsin, executive of a wet State, was silent on Prohibition. Rhode Island and Connecticut, with good enforcement laws but wet inclinations, avoided definite alignments on the ground of the problem not being an issue.
Of the 35 legislatures chosen, 30 are admittedly dry in both houses. But one legislature, that of Maryland, is wet in both houses. Pour States have legislatures with one house wet and one dry. There is no escaping the fact that the voters throughout the nation, in choosing their legislatures,FEW WET SPOTS ON THE MAP 233
have registered an almost unanimous dry will. This can hardly be laughed off.
If a wet and a dry map were made on the basis of the last election, the wet spots, it is only fair to say, would be quite inconsiderable. A charitable interpretation of the returns would give the wets six States—New York, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin, Connecticut and Bhode Island. They divided honors in three others—New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Actually there are but three wet States, New York, Maryland and Wisconsin. Admittedly there are 39 dry States. Dry dominance therefore is no less than overwhelming.
The “ Wet Fringe”
Dry America, Mr. Du Puy remarks, has only a wet fringe.
The wet fringe on the Atlantic seaboard forgets that stupendous sweep from Pennsylvania to the Pacific, from Pennsylvania to the Gulf. That little area that is one-tenth of the nation is provincial and considers itself the whole. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, in their wetness, think of themselves as the voice of the nation. It is doubtful if they could dominate even this one-tenth on which they are placed, for there are Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Delaware; and non-metropolitan New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland that are unequivocally dry.
In fact, there are but a few spots of dense234 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
population that are wet. Their size as compared with the vast expanse of the nation is quite inconsiderable. Wet America is but a fringe on one corner of her raiment. It is a very vocal fringe, and therefore has attracted much attention. But before considering it seriously as an element of the first magnitude in politics it should be laid out on the counter and its actual yardage taken. This is a matter of measurement and not of noise.
As for the State referenda on the results of which the wets build their hopes, analysis shows that in four States, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and Nevada, the referenda were not contested by the dry organizations. These mostly instructed their followers not to participate, giving as their reasons that the results would not be binding on Congress, and that they ought not, by voting, to give indorsement to this unusual method of attacking the Constitution, and that the drys should not by this method be diverted from their efforts to elect dry State legislators and Congressmen.
With respect to the so-called Prohibition “waves,” the Moderation League fails to note their most significant feature, namely, that as they receded each left, first a few, then more States permanently inundated.
Maine was the first to be permanently submerged in 1846, then Kansas in 1867. These were followed by North Dakota, Georgia and Okla-NATIONAL PEOHIBITION DELUGE 235
homa (1889-1907); then came North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia (1908-1912); following these, the ten-year limit set by the wets for the general ebb of a prohibition wave has expired in the cases of Colorado, Virginia, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Alabama, South Carolina, Michigan, Nebraska, South Dakota, Utah, Indiana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico—-in all of which State Prohibition has been in force from eleven to twenty years.
Small wonder that the National Prohibition deluge, when it came in 1919, swept over forty-six out of forty-eight States, and from these has since receded by the repeal of State enactments only in New York and Montana.CHAPTER XV
IN EDUCATION FOR TEMPERANCE!
Wet View
In “Prohibition at Its Worst,” on which temperance authorities rely for teaching the latest scientific facts concerning the effects of alcohol, it is stated that a man who drinks a glass of beer “is one glass of beer drunk,” that “the physiological or biological ideal to-day is not temperance, but total abstinence,” and that “so-called moderate drinking merely means moderate intoxication.” These statements are disputed by the wets as being unscientific.
Unscientific School Textbooks
The Superintendent of Schools of New York City on March 6, 1928, reminded all District Superintendents and public school Principals of Section 691 of the Education Law of New York, which provides for teaching the “nature of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics and their effects on the human system.” If it is the intent of the school textbooks to teach the evils of drink only, then the very law under which the teaching is conducted would be violated, since it provides for imparting knowledge of the “nature and effects”
236EFFECTS OF STRICT MODERATION" 337
of alcohol, or both sides of the matter. Some forty years ago the Committee of Fifty on Alcoholic Traffic, of which Seth Low, William Bayard Cutting, Charles W. Eliot, William H. Welch, William M. Sloan and others were members, handed down a report which stated that for many years the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the writers of school textbooks had emphasized to the point of exaggeration the harmful effects of moderate drinking.
Many experiments have been cited to show that alcohol is harmful. Every one admits the validity of those experiments that indicated its detrimental effect on precise mental operations, such as are involved in typewriting, target shooting, typesetting, and motor driving. Dr. Morris Fish-bein states, on the other hand, that mental operations are shortened, the simple reactions and reaction times quickened, mental associations— such as making words to rhyme—made easier, and public speaking indulged in with facility. This has been taught to be the result of primary mental stimulation. But Professor W. E. Dixon, the noted British pharmacologist, emphasizes the fact that these effects are the result of inhibition or depression of the higher centers of the brain.
Dr. Fishbein asserts that there is not the slightest scientific evidence to indicate that alcohol taken in moderation ever appreciably shortened anyone’s existence. “When it is taken in strict mod-288 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
eration, injurious effects are yet to be proved,” says Professor Dixon.
On the biological side, Raymond Pearl, Director of the Institute for Biological Research of Johns Hopkins University, draws the conclusion in his book, “Alcohol and Longevity,” that the moderate drinker not only suffers no apparent injury from small doses of alcohol, but seems to gain a slight actual benefit. His chances of life at any given age, Dr. Pearl reports, are equal or even superior to the chances of a teetotaler.
Pearl is only one of many whose experiments dealing with the effects of alcohol on posterity indicate that it often acts selectively, causing elimination of weak stock, so that the remaining stock is more vigorous.
Dr. Herbert S. Jennings, Director of the Zoological Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, has summed up the results of Whitney, Noyes and Finesinger, who have kept various lower organisms for twenty or more generations under the influence of alcohol. The alcohol, they find, lowers fertility, vitality, and resistance in these organisms. On removing them from the alcohol, the first generation still have a lowered vitality. But in the next and subsequent generations the injurious effect has completely disappeared. Stockard found that in a considerable proportion of cases, guinea-pigs subjected to alcoholism give descendants that are weak or seriously defective,ALCOHOLIC TESTS ON HEREDITY 239
to the second and third generation. But after three generations the defects had disappeared, apparently through the elimination of the individuals bearing them.
Stockard then examined from this point of view the descendants of his guinea-pigs. Though in the second and third generations from the alcoholized parents they were weaker and more defective than normal, in the fourth generation they showed, like Pearl’s alcoholized fowls, a lower mortality rate than the descendants of unalcohol-ized individuals. Thus the final upshot was a more vigorous population. MacDowell, Dr. Jennings notes, found that alcoholized white rats produced fewer litters and fewer young to the litter; but these off spring in turn produced larger litters, and the descendants in both generations were larger than the descendants of the non-alcoholized stock. Selective elimination in these cases is the key-word.
Modern Experiments Recording “Benefits”
Not Noted
These modem experiments are not noted in the temperance textbooks.
In failing, therefore, to teach the “benefits” as well as the evils of alcohol in moderate drinking, in its effects on longevity, and in its selective action in weeding out the unfit, as discovered by experiments on lower organisms, the wets declare240 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
that the teaching of temperance under national Prohibition is still at its worst.
Further, the associations dedicated to the repeal or modification of the Prohibition Laws declare that they are the ones who teach true temperance. Despite the defects of temperance teaching that are noted above, these organizations hold that for many decades before National Prohibition, the evils of drink had been steadily diminishing through the educative influence of public opinion. Habits of excess which were common in times that many men can distinctly remember, had become rare and exceptional; habitual drunkenness, formerly regarded with a certain kindly tolerance, had come to be looked upon as an inexcusable vice. Fabian Franklin contends that even during the last two or three decades, the change had been steadily progressing—the change from immoderate indulgence to temperate enjoyment, the change often from drinking at all to total abstinence, the change from the time when drunken men were a familiar sight to the time when they had become an unusual spectacle.
So far as this steady education in sobriety has been relaxed, both through public opinion and the schools, and the education of revolt against the coercion of the Federal Law has been substituted, it is held that the situation under Prohibition has worsened.SCHOOLS HELPED BEING PROHIBITION 241
Dby View
None of the associations formed to tear down the Prohibition Laws of the States and the National Government, avowing their aim to he the restoration and teaching of true temperance, have had part or lot—other than an obstructive one— in the teaching of temperance in the schools.
Prohibition "Nurtured in the Schools
The enactment of State Prohibition Laws which culminated in National Prohibition gained added momentum in 1907. Of the origin of these laws the Hon. Samuel J. Barrows, formerly of the International Prison Commission, said in The Outlook in 1908, that “one reason for the growth of temperance sentiment” was the fact that systematic temperance teaching of youth had been going on for years, and “the result of this education has been telling in the boys and girls who have grown to manhood and womanhood. ... A new generation has grown up and has found that alcoholic drinks are not necessary for health or happiness.”
Such testimony, together with the rapid spread of Prohibition in the States, would seem, on its face, to bear out the assumption on the Wet side of this chapter that matters were progressing well enough without the intervention of National Prohibition.243 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
Counter-Effects of Liquor Campaign
But this strengthening of the sober sentiment of the nation, as manifest in local option and State prohibitory enactments, was accompanied by a determined advertising campaign by the brewing and distilling interests that increased the per capita consumption of beer, wines and distilled spirits in 1910-1914, as compared with the two preceding five-year periods. Although per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages was lower during this period than in European countries, the rate of consumption was declining in Great Britain, Germany, and, in the case of wines, in France, while it was rising in the United States. The testimony brought out in the United States Senate investigation of the brewing and liquor interests and German propaganda in 1919 revealed the fact that the liquor interests relied upon their advertising campaign to counteract the Prohibition campaign.
Of course, the distribution of drink was uneven, as it has always been, and it is altogether possible that the systematic advertising by the brewers and distillers caused those who did drink to drink more frequently, while at the same time the schools and temperance and religious organizations were turning out more teetotalers. Both sides grew into strongly intrenched camps. But it was found that the “Wets could ship wet intoPROGRAM OP MODERN TEACHING 243
dry territory, while the Drys could not ship dry into wet territory.” This disadvantage was evened by the coming of National Prohibition.
A report made in 1924 presents a modern temperance program for public schools and teacher training institutions, as prepared by the American Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education of the National Education Association and the American Medical Association.
Modern business reasons for abstinence are given in this report. It prescribes the teaching to children aged twelve to fourteen of facts concerning alcohol handicaps; that changes from a century ago in methods of transportation, by railroads, steamboats, motor vehicles, and airships, and in production from handwork to machinery, require clear brains and steady nerves. The program would show why American railroad engineers voluntarily became total abstainers, and why railroads require abstinence on the part of train operatives. It would tell the effects of alcohol in alertness, perception, judgment, ability to see, interpret, and respond to signals or signs of danger. It would give simple accounts of experiments proving that these effects increase susceptibility to infectious diseases and such poisons as lead.
The report recommends that the twelve-year-olds be taught total abstinence as an advantage to the worker. It would recount the tests show-244 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOKST
mg that alcohol compels a greater expenditure of energy in doing a given piece of work, making hard work harder, and that fatigue appears sooner. It would tell why good food and hot and nourishing drinks are better than beer for the tired worker. It recommends better means than using alcoholic drinks for meeting exposure to extremes of temperature.
Shortened Life of “Moderate” Drinkers
To Dr. Fishbein’s assertion that the shortening of life from alcohol taken in moderation has never been proved, is opposed the testimony of Dr. Oscar H. Rogers, Chief Medical Director of the New York Life Insurance Company (“The Effect of Alcohol upon Longevity”) that the mortality rate of those who when accepted are listed as moderate drinkers by the life insurance companies is 32 per cent higher than that of policy holders listed as abstainers. That some moderate drinkers as well as some abstainers may become heavy drinkers before they die is one of the risks of moderate drinking. The teaching of the life insurance figures to children is very much to the point.
Nor are the experiments of Pearl, Whitney, Noyes, and Finesinger on the lower animals conclusive enough for temperance teaching. In summarizing their results Dr. Herbert S. Jennings in his Forum article finds that with some animals alcohol eliminates normals, “leaving a greaterBOOK WITH A MISTAKEN- METHOD 245
proportion of abnormals,” and “if this should happen in man, with defects extending even to the third generation only, as in the guinea-pig, there would be matter for serious consideration.” He adds :
“Do these results give a basis for practical measures in man? Obviously not.”
As for Pearl’s report about the longer life of moderate drinkers, it encounters the criticism of Eugene L. Fisk, M.D., Medical Director of the Life Extension Institute, as follows :
The groups analyzed include 5,248 people about whom we have the vaguest possible information as to their condition of health at the ages they entered the classification, and the sub-groups upon which Professor Pearl has built his life tables are too small for such treatment. For example, there were 67 women in the female class of heavy drinkers. Fancy building a survivorship table on 67 people and deriving therefrom a generalization as to the effect of alcohol to be applied to the whole human race!
H. Westergaard, Professor of Statistics and Social Economy, University of Stockholm, has also paid his respects to Professor Pearl’s book by declaring it “one of the most confused books I ever read,” and that the method the author followed “is entirely wrong.”
The conclusions of a book that receives such criticism, and differing so widely from the experi-246 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
ence of life insurance companies covering millions of lives, need hardly be taught in the public schools.
A British report, that of the Medical Research Council on the action of alcohol on the human organism, makes a grudging and difficult concession —but only on physiological grounds—to the adult moderate drinker. In this it specifically excludes all consideration of the advantages of entire sobriety to efficiency, reliability, responsibility, mutual understanding and good will. The committee of the American Medical Association and the National Education Association, on the other hand, links together such considerations in urging that the schools teach total abstinence.
Teaching of Total Abstinence Justified
This committee would describe as intoxication the initial stages of gaiety, volubility or extravagance of speech, and slight clumsiness or inaccuracy in movement, as well as the later stages of staggering and stupor. It would hail such conclusions as that of Dr, Francis G. Benedict, of the Nutrition Laboratory, Carnegie 'Institution of Washington, in referring to experiments by Miles in that laboratory :
His efforts to study alcohol and human efficiency led inexorably to the following statement: “There is no longer room for doubt in reference to the toxic action of alcoholicCO-OPERATION BY STATE OFFICIALS 247
beverages as weak as 2.75 per cent by weight.” No one who examines his protocols will care to take issue with him on this point. Clearly, dilution, even to 2.75 per cent, cannot solve the alcohol problem, nor can it alter our estimate of the effect of alcohol upon human efficiency.
In addition to the instruction in the schools, we have also that of the temperance organizations. Since Prohibition the educational officials of many States have expressed themselves as heartily intent on scientific instruction of temperance in the schools. Reasons given are that it is necessary to acquaint all children, and especially newcomers of foreign parentage, with the position the United States has taken against alcoholic drinks; that an intelligent public sentiment will prevent or overcome illicit manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages; that there should be continued warning as to the dangers in wine and beer and in home-made fermented beverages.
Starting with no laws, no textbooks, practically no precedent, the temperance forces had so far won by the first years of the twentieth century that scientific temperance instruction was not only a recognized and legal part of the educational system of the entire country, but it had for its assistance a variety of textbooks published by standard publishers of school books, adapted to all ages of pupils, books whose teachings had kept248 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
pace with the scientific progress of the years. The current debate on the merits of Prohibition only serves to give this historical movement added momentum.CHAPTER XVI
IN THE LIGHT OF CANADA’S EXPERIENCE?
Wet View
In his speech of August 22, 1928, accepting the Democratic nomination to the Presidency, Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York said:
Some immediate relief would come from an amendment to the Volstead law giving a scientific definition of the alcoholic content of an intoxicating beverage. The present definition is admittedly inaccurate and unscientific. Each State would then be allowed to fix its own standard of alcoholic content, subject always to the proviso that that standard could not exceed the maximum fixed by the Congress.
I believe, moreover ... in an amendment in the Eighteenth Amendment which would give to each individual State itself, only after approval by a referendum popular vote of its people, the right wholly within its borders to import, manufacture or cause to be manufactured, and sell alcoholic beverages, the sale to be made only by the State itself and not for consumption in any public place. We may well learn from the experience of other nations. Our Canadian neighbors have gone far in this manner to solve
249250 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
this problem by the method of sale made by the State itself and not by private individuals. . . . Such a method would continue to make interstate shipment of intoxicating beverages a crime. It would preserve for the dry States Federal enforcement of Prohibition within their own borders. It would permit to citizens of other States a carefully limited and controlled method of effectuating the popular will wholly within the borders of those States without the old evil of the saloon.
Intoxicating Liquors Are the Goal
That is, if the “scientific definition of the alcoholic content of an intoxicating beverage” permitted 2.75 per cent beer as non-intoxicating, Governor Smith would have the Volstead Act so declare, and extend permission to any State so to declare. But Mr. Smith’s proposed amendment to the Eighteenth Amendment would go further, in that it would permit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors within individual States, as decided by popular referendum. This amendment would frankly substitute for Prohibition within such States the so-called Canadian or Quebec plan of government dispensaries for the sale of fermented and spirituous beverages.
In presenting as the wet view the favorable aspect of the Quebec system, nothing more authoritative or sympathetic could be found than the fol-REPORT ON SYSTEM OP QUEBEC
251
lowing passages taken from the report of the Quebec Liquor Commission in 1923—after the Quebec system had been in force for two years— on the Commission’s establishment at Montreal. The report says :
After having carefully followed the Prohibitionist experiments carried out in the United States and in some of the Canadian Provinces, after having attempted the introduction at home of a system of modified Prohibition, after having sounded out all classes of public opinion, the Quebec Government decided, in 1921, to make an attempt to solve the problem of alcoholism through the establishment of a State Monopoly to handle the liquor trade in our Province. .	.	.
In its broad lines the Quebec Liquor Law places the Wine and Spirit Trade in the hands of a Commission nominated by the Government, and likewise subjects the sale of beer to the control of the same Commission. .	. .
By means of numerous high windows the warehouses (of the Commission), like the offices, receive abundant air, light and sunshine, which, added to the scrupulous cleanliness prevailing throughout as already noted, enable the entire staff to work under hygienic conditions, approaching almost the ideal. . .
This same attention to details of cleanliness, hygiene, and what amounts to the same thing, the health of the staff, is also extended to the public consumer. The most exacting precautions are taken by the Commission to252 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
ensure the standard quality of the goods offered to the public. A competent staff in Europe supervises the selection of the wines and spirits dealt in by the Commission. Merchants soliciting orders from the Commission must first submit three samples of their goods. One of these samples is analyzed at the offices which the Commission has opened in Paris in order to maintain direct contact with the Trade in foreign imported liquors; the second is forwarded for a similar purpose to the Commission’s laboratory in Montreal, where French and Canadian experts supervise the classification of these samples; while the third is retained for comparison with the goods when delivered. On arrival, the goods themselves are subjected to careful analysis, both in Europe and in Montreal, in order that the Commission may have complete assurance that they conform in every way to the samples submitted and accepted. Orders are only placed on the recommendation of the technical advisors of the Commission, and must be signed by three Commissioners.
High Quality Is Assured
Of all products offered to the public by the Commission, wines offer the biggest problem for care and preservation. Here again the Commission has retained the services of French experts who are in charge of the cellars and control the operation of bottling wines imported in bulk. The Commission is thus in a position to offer to the public con-GOVERNMENT STORES IN QUEBEC 253
srnner wines and spirits of unexceptionable quality, which our people possibly do not appreciate at their true value. It would seem that on this point the U. S. Bootleggers show themselves to be better posted, since they go to considerable expense in forging counterfeit reproductions of the Commission’s labels, and affixing them on their bottles of spurious and frequently deleterious liquors, in order to trade for their own advantage on the high repute in which the Commission’s products are held by American consumers.
The Quebec Liquor Act prescribes the sale of liquors, wines and beer in the following order. First, Spirits; only the stores owned and operated by the Commission have the right to sell, and each buyer can only lawfully purchase one bottle at a time. The Commission cannot open a store in any place where Prohibition has been adopted by a vote of the local electors. At present the Commission has in actual operation 75 stores. Wine and beer can be sold by the glass in restaurants and hotels, with meals, to the patrons of such establishments. Beer may be sold by the bottle by grocers holding licenses from the Commission; and by the glass by taverns licensed in the same manner. These taverns, which correspond to the former “saloons,” but with the important difference that they can sell nothing else except beer, number 305 at the present time in the City of Montreal. It is interesting to compare this figure with that of old-time saloons, at the period when the liquor trade was flourishing under private254 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
ownership. With a population scarcely half as great as that of to-day, Montreal then numbered some 600 saloons, the profits of which went to the enrichment of their owners; whereas the majority of the taverns to-day draw just about enough trade to prevent their owners from going into bankruptcy. From this fact alone we realize that, without Prohibition, our Province has taken giant strides along the road to temperance. Well-known statistics on the decrease of drunkenness in our Province only go to vindicate our previous contention, and to prove beyond all doubt the value of our legislative policy with respect to liquor, as a temperance measure.
In the 1924 report of the Commission we read the following:
More Beer, Less Spirits
As we predicted in our last report for 1922-1923, the total sales during the past year barely exceed the amount of receipts during the preceding year. Our anticipations with respect to the maximum figure which our trading operations might be expected to reach proved to be correct. . . .
The improvement which has developed in the distribution of wine, as well as the increase established in the consumption of beer, lead us to expect in the future a corresponding decrease in the consumption of spirits; there is consequently good reason to believe that the total value of sales for the year nextWAKEHOUSE SPACE PROVES TOO SMALL 255
ensuing will probably be 5 per cent to 10 per cent less than was realized in the past year.
The necessity of enlarging our warehousing facilities has become increasingly apparent, particularly during the last fiscal year, the space which we had at our disposal up to the present proving to be inadequate for our requirements. This need of warehouse room has been manifested chiefly as a conse-quence of the expansion shown by the wine trade. We have accordingly been authorized to construct a new wing to our principal warehouse at “Au-Pied-du-Courant.” and we hope by this means to effect important economies in our warehousing costs. .	. .
It affords us pleasure to state that the public patronage extended to our exclusive wine stores has been quite in accordance with our estimates and with the facilities provided in order to offer the public a first-class service. It will be our earnest endeavor to promote the extension of this branch of our service, if, as we anticipate, the consumption of wine becomes still more accentuated.
It is equally satisfactory to record the improvement noticeable in hotels and other institutions caring for the wants of the traveling public. This happier state of affairs may be attributed to the conviction that the results achieved by the present regime justify an improved upkeep, and guarantee a continuity of this policy, in such manner as to assure satisfactory returns on the capital invested in the hotel industry.256 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
Prices oe Spirits
. . . On one case of Scotch Whiskey of 12 bottles, the amount on which the Sales tax is levied, is calculated as follows:
Cost of the Scotch Whiskey itself.....$16.00
Duty at $10.00 per proof gallon, on the
basis of 25 under-proof............. 17.08
British excise tax at the rate of £3.126 per gallon: allowing 1 y2 gals, proof per proof case, namely £4.8/9 at $4.40 per £ sterling........................ 23.92
$57.00
Sales tax 5% (6% previous to January 1st, 1924)............................  2.85
Consequently out of this amount of $2.85 we are paying in reality only 80 cents on the actual value of the goods, and in addition $2.05 tax on other taxes.
It is evident that the Sales Tax, nominally 5 per cent, is in reality 16y2 per cent on the prime cost of the goods. It is no less evident that the aggregate amount of the Customs, Excise, and Sales Taxes reach no less than 124 per cent of the initial cost of the goods, in other words a tax of $1.66 on a single bottle, of which the cost to us (exclusive of freight cartage, insurance, etc.) is $1.33 1/3. We make no formal objection against either the imposition of this tax or the rate at which it is assessed; our only purpose is that the public should be well-posted on this point, inSALES INCREASE, RECEIPTS SHRINK 257
order that this important element may be borne in mind in any criticism to which our administration may be subjected.
Receipts Shrink in 1925 In its 1925 report the Commission states:
We have to report a considerable decrease in our gross receipts for the past year. As may be ascertained by referring to the Revenue and Expense Account, the total figure of sales reached the sum of $17,887,588.19 during the year 1924-1925, as against $19,-812,781.23 during the preceding year, showing a total decrease of $1,925,193.04. The Quebec District, on the one hand, recorded a slight increase of $64,889.68, whereas the Montreal District showed a decline of $1,-990,082.72. ...
The distribution of goods indicates nevertheless an increase in the volume of sales, since our sales in 1923-24 amounted to 1,407,-830 gallons of Wines and Spirits, whereas in 1924-25, they reached a total of 1,440,075 gallons, showing an improvement to the extent of 32,245 gallons.
This increase is to be attributed solely to the growing consumption of the lighter grades of liquor. At the same time as the tendency towards a greater consumption of wine is accentuated, we also have to record a decrease in the consumption of spirits. The following statistics taken from the past two years will serve to confirm this statement: In 1923-24, the sale of spirits reached 775,995 gallons,258 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
whereas in 1924-25, sales dropped to 718,053, equal to a decrease of 57,942 gallons, or about 7y2 per cent. On the other hand, the sale of wines in 1923-24 reached 631,835 gallons, rose in 1924-25 to 722,022 gallons, an increase of 90,187 gallons, equal to 14% per cent. .
Our sales of Wine in 1924-25 exceeded our sales of Spirits by 23,814, while in 1923-24 they were lower by 864,960 bottles. It is this gradual substitution of wines for spirits which explains the decrease in our gross receipts as indicated above. . . .
Less Spirits, More Wine
We consider it of the utmost importance that the information supplied by these figures should be placed squarely before the public. It has been asserted in some quarters that our control of liquor had encouraged a greater consumption of spirits. We have always maintained the contrary, and the great bulk of our population shares our opinion that the Quebec system of control would be advantageous to public health, during the transition period, by gradually educating the consumer to forsake strong spirits in favor of wine, of which the alcoholic content is seven or eight times less than that of spirits. We think the figures above quoted confirm beyond question that the opinion of those who favor the present system in the interests of temperance, is both reasonable and corroborated by well-established facts and not on mere supposition.POSSIBLE EXCEPT IX ITS VITALS 259
The expansion of the Tourist traffic, which has so greatly developed in this Province, invites our close attention to. the improvement of Hotel accommodation. This task, begun in 1923-24, has been followed up with no less vigor than last year, and new steps have been taken this year to increase the efficiency of this effort, from which we hope eventually to obtain the best results.
Dry View
“Legally possible in everything but its vitals” is the judgment of Governor Smith’s proposal given by Professor Howard Lee McBain of Columbia University in his book, “Prohibition, Legal and Illegal,”—so far as the proposal would permit the individual States to deal with liquor as they choose under “a scientific definition of the alcoholic content of an intoxicating beverage.” Professor McBain adds:
No Leeway in Scientific Definition
No “scientific definition” of an intoxicating beverage could possibly fix an alcoholic content that would give the States any leeway worth striving for.
As has been said, and as everybody, including Governor Smith, knows, even the most moderate wets want wine and beer that are in fact intoxicating by any kind of scientific definition. And they will be satisfied with nothing less. They cannot have this legally unless the Supreme Court can be induced to260 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
say that Congress has complete and final power to define.
This is the opinion of an authority on Constitutional law. An authority of equal weight in the scientific field is Dr. Walter R. Miles, whose classic researches at the Carnegie Institution of Washington are summed up in his study of “Alcohol and Human Efficiency.” Dr. Miles states: “There is no longer room for doubt in reference to the toxic action of alcoholic beverages as weak as 2.75 per cent by weight.”
It is therefore on a further amendment to the Constitution permitting in the individual States a trial of the Quebec System of intoxicating liquors, frankly acknowledged as such and dispensed by the government, that Governor Smith must rely if his proposal is to bear any fruit. But such an amendment can be secured only by persuading thirty-six States, most of which are now dry.
A tree is known by its fruits. Has the Provincial Liquor System, now being tried out in its various forms in seven of the nine Canadian Provinces, served its declared purpose of decreasing the consumption of alcoholic liquors! Has it checked bootleggery? Has it diminished drunken driving of motor cars! Has it improved social conditions! The following facts have been gathered by the Rev. Ben H. Spence of the CanadianCANADA’S DEINE BILL EISES
261
Prohibition Bureau of Toronto, from government reports, sworn evidence and official reports.
Increased Sales
In all the seven Provinces the sales under the government dispensary system have increased. The drink bill of the Province of Quebec rose from $50,961,941 in 1925 to $64,343,152 in 1927. The increase was for strong spirits as well as for beer and wines. Liquor selling places increased from 1,861 in 1922 to 2,973 in 1927.
The drink bill of British Columbia, under its government dispensaries, rose from $11,362,299.26 in 1925, to $13,805,089.50 in 1927. If the resale of beer sold to licensees be reckoned at 100 per cent profit, the 1927 figure rises to $15,996,573.40.
The drink bill of Alberta rose from $7,178,440.63 in 1924, to $12,109,849.48 in 1927, an expenditure of more than $20 per capita. Consumption of spirits rose from 114,000 gallons in 1925, to 151,-000 gallons in 1927, an increase of 32.5 per cent in two years. Consumption of wines rose from 50,000 gallons in 1925 to 133,000 gallons in 1927. Consumption of beer rose from 2,283,750 gallons in 1924 to 3,625,500 gallons in 1927.
In Saskatchewan the drink bill rose from $7,-812,674 in 1926 to $10,305,207 in 1927. Consumption of wine and spirits increased along with consumption of beer.
The total drink bill of Manitoba was $5,624,-262 PBOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
440.10 in 1925, and $8,473,696.49 in 1927. This includes an estimated price of beer to the consumer at $2.00 per gallon. Government store sales rose from $2,962,910.10 in 1925 to $3,793,772.49 in 1927.
In New Brunswick sales by vendors from November 1,1926, to April 1,1927, were $553,891.07. From May 1, 1927, to October 31, 1927, sales by the Liquor Control Board reached $1,085,895.82. By October 31, the new liquor-selling system was dispensing 714 per cent more liquor than was dispensed by the vendors under the system which it replaced.
The figures for sales in Ontario for the first year of the dispensary system are unavailable. From June 1 to October 31, 1927, total sales were $17,533,659.41, of which sales of strong spirits were $10,628,133.76, or 60.62 per cent. The system started with only 18 shops; by October 31, it had 80 in operation. At first the liquor was not sold direct by brewers. There were no brewers’ warehouses. By October 31, beer was being sold in 11 such places and the number of wineries had increased. Beer was being dispensed to consumers through 1,102 licensed hotels, 541 licensed restaurants, 519 licensed shops, 86 licensed brewers’ light beer warehouses, 84 licensed clubs, a total of 2,332 selling places.
The Province of Quebec has been led to take great pride in the low rate of arrests for drunkenness, and the people have co-operated to keep theMORE BEER, MORE SPIRITS DRUNK 263
total down; arrests declined from 10,000 in 1921 to 5,000 in 1926. This reduction was accomplished in the face of a steadily increasing liquor consumption until, in 1927, a marked increase of arrests occurred.
Of course, comparison of arrests in one locality with those in another can easily be misleading. They measure strictness of police activities as well as crime. Connecticut has in New Haven and Bridgeport two cities of similar size, one of which has eight times as many arrests for drunkenness as the other. But there is no such difference in the amounts of liquor consumed in these two cities.
But that which is significant in the report of the Quebec commissioners is that the consumption of beer has gradually increased by 25 per cent since 1921, and there has been a steady increase in the consumption of spirits of 50 per cent since the system was instituted; also, that the consumption of spirituous liquor has more than kept pace with the beer sales. If the purpose of the Federal sale was to diminish alcoholic consumption and especially to divert the consumption of spirits to the drinking of malt liquors, it is a flat failure. The figures for 1927-28 have not yet been published, but it is admitted that there has been an increase in the number of vendors’ licenses and in the total liquor dispensed. The amount of liquor imported during 1927 shows a large increase.264 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
The Tavern
The place which the saloon filled in the social life of the Quebec cities is displaced by the Tavern through the Quebec law. Here, only beer can be sold, but it is full strength beer. The customer may not drink his glass standing up, but must sit down to a table. There is no limitation in the amount that he may drink, and the treating system is permitted. Women may drink in the tavern as well as men; and beer is lawfully sold, as well as liquor in the dispensaries, to youth who “appear” to be 18 years old.
The chief distinctive feature of the tavern is that a man may not lawfully mix his drinks. This probably does reduce drunkenness. Of course, a group of men will drink as much beer sitting as standing up, perhaps more. This method of drinking offers peculiar opportunities to the harlot to ply her trade. The taverns are at least as numerous as the old saloons, and are located wherever trade will support them. They are plentiful in those sections of the city that can least afford to maintain them.
The Dispensary
The Quebec dispensary system is similar to that of Ontario. Their regulations do not control, and a buyer can repeat or go the rounds and secure enough liquor in a day to supply wants for monthsBOOTLEGGING IN ONTARIO
265
if lie has the money. The liquor commissioner blends the liquor which he sells, mixing imported with native or with grain alcohol, and usually dilutes the finished product. In addition to furnishing an easy source of supply to the alcoholic, the system is open to the objection that it encourages bottle “toting” and that having liquor on the person or in the house makes it easy to drink to excess. The commissioners deliver liquor by mail or express to customers in local option territory, in which nearly half of the population lives. As in Ontario, the beer parlors and dispensaries encourage the drinking of liquor by youth, and the same complaints are heard which are offered against Prohibition in the States. The increase in number of arrests for liquor law violation, the steady increase in bootlegging and illicit distilling are much in evidence, and the commissioners frankly state that they are unable to eradicate it.
Health Conditions in Quebec
Vital statistics for the Province show the death rate for tuberculosis 80 per cent higher than that in the rest of the Dominion of Canada. For pneumonia the death rate is 70 per cent higher. For nephritic diseases it is 80 per cent higher. While deaths from alcohol and sclerosis of the liver are only in small part recorded, the records show much higher—40 per cent higher than the remaining sections of Canada.266 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Bootleggery
Attorney General Craig, of Manitoba, in defining the relation of bootlegging to the Government Control of alcoholic beverages, says:
Retail bootlegging has increased, due to the removal of the first main difficulty of any one proposing to deal illicitly with liquor, namely, the obtaining of supplies, a condition intensified by the fact that in addition to all former avenues of supply, such unlawful trafficker can now lawfully purchase liquor (from the Government) which he intends for resale, particularly in districts where obtaining liquor previously was always difficult and frequently impossible.
This relation is the same in all the liquor control provinces. The bootlegger is patronized by those who wish to buy liquor by the drink rather than take it home with them, and by convivial drinkers who wish to pay for their drinks as they drink them. Hon. L. B. Cordeau, Chairman of the Quebec Liquor Commission, says:	“Some
people find it more fun buying from a blind pig than from a Government store and some would rather get it where there is a woman than drink it alone.” Bootlegging and immoral resorts go together. Then there are the Canadian youth. Permits to buy liquor are refused to all persons under 21. The bootleggers, whose problem of getting supplies is solved by the Government, canCONVICTIONS OP ILLICIT RETAILERS 267
supply the youth with greater facility than is the case in the United States.
In Ontario the convictions for breaches of the Ontario Temperance Act and the Liquor Control Act, month by month, show 1,681 convictions for the seven months prior to Liquor Control, and almost as many, or 1,614, during only the first five months of control. Since the Government stores and brewery warehouses have supplanted the wholesale bootleggers, this increase in convictions refers to the retail bootlegging. It is the activities of the retailer that count, for it is he who establishes contact with the consumer. The convictions for October, 1927, under the Liquor Control Act were 395, nearly double the 202 convictions for May, the last month under the Temperance Act. Under “liquor control” every hotel room becomes a potential saloon, because the definition of a “private house,” in which liquor may be held or disposed of without restriction, has been stretched to cover a hotel room. It covers also a pleasure boat and a temporary residence in a motor camp. Hotel proprietors, lessees, managers or employees are allowed to keep, have or give liquor without restriction as to persons to whom it is given or the hour when it is supplied. Having solved the problem of supply, bootleggers may now center their attention on the selling end, at which their success Is real.
In Quebec the complaints of bootlegging have268 PROHIBITION- STILL AT ITS WORST
steadily increased from 2,929 in 1922 to 8,136 in 1927.
In British. Columbia two methods have been suggested for combating the bootleggers—lengthening the hours of Government sale and lowering the price of liquor! Also, the liquor-selling Provinces have asked that the Dominion authority lower the excise tax, in order to permit them to outsell or undersell the bootleggers. All of these measures would amount to competition in sales and the increase of consumption of liquors—contrary to the avowed purpose of the Government system.
In Alberta the provision by which an habitual drunkard may forfeit his permit to buy, if he has one, or be interdicted if he had none, plays into the hands of the bootleggers. As more than two thirds of those interdicted during the four years 1924-27 had no purchase permits, it is certain that every person with an alcoholic appetite and no permit is a prospective customer to any alert bootlegger.
In Saskatchewan a Provincial police officer recently said:	“All the Chinese restaurants are
bootlegging. They get their supplies from the Government store.” Violations of the Liquor Act have increased by 111 per cent under Government control.
In Manitoba the Liquor Act convictions have risen from 793 in 1924 to 1,096 in 1926.AN IMPROVEMENT AGAINST ODDS 269
During the Period of Prohibition in Ontario (1917-1926) the breweries and distilleries in Canada were active and organized to defeat Prohibition by pouring in bootleg liquor and could not be prevented from doing so by provincial law. It is a wonder that Prohibition succeeded at all under such conditions.
Yet there was a fall in the death rate of Ontario during these years (1917-1927) of 12 per cent. Chiefly conspicuous is the decline in the diseases aggravated by alcoholism. Tuberculosis fell one-third, pneumonia one-fifth, while deaths from alcoholism fell one-half. In Toronto arrests for drunkenness decreased by more than one-half in the face of increasing population and stricter standards of public order. Economic conditions directly traceable to Prohibition quite manifestly improved.
But in 1924, following the example of other Provinces, the question of the continuance of Prohibition was put to popular vote. The ballots offered the choice between Prohibition and government “control”; this term was a misnomer and should have read “government sale.” The Province voted dry. But the Parliament elected on this issue refused to obey the mandate and enacted a law legalizing beer with 4.4 per cent of alcoholic content by volume, and later establishing brewery warehouses and dispensaries for the sale of strong beer and other liquors.270 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
Arrests for the City of Toronto
1926	1927
Under Prohibition	Under Government Sale during
with 4.4% Beer	last six months
Drunkenness ..... 5,060	5,411*
Disorderly ...... 1,014	1,628
Theft ........... 2,054	2,378
Assault............ 458	504
Violation of liquor law ...............
Following is an extract from the report of the Chief Constable of the City of Toronto for the year 1927 :
However, in spite of the activity of the police, illicit liquor selling by the glass or in small quantities is still evident, chiefly by reason of individuals being able to buy large quantities daily from the Stores ; these amounts being excessive in many cases and beyond what they could be expected in their homes, proving a sale is much more difficult than under the old act.
There were 1,078 prosecutions under both liquor laws in 1927 as against 1,117 in 1926.
Fines for drunkenness amounted to $127,-283 in 1927, as against $48,644 in 1926.
Motor Accidents
The increase in motor accidents may be judged from the accompanying table. It is only cases of those who are called “drunk” that appear in thé
*The important increase occurred in the later six months of the year.MODERATE DRINKERS IN ACCIDENTS 271
courts. But Judge Fisher, of Brampton, in charging a jury, said:
It is impossible, in my estimation, to take one drink and manage a car properly. The man who takes two, or even one drink cannot handle his car or himself as well as the man who has taken none.
In sentencing the driver of a truck who was found guilty of manslaughter for running over a four-year-old child in October, 1927, Justice Riddell of Montreal said:
You had obscured your mind and judgment by drinking alcoholic liquor. No doubt you thought you were sober—that is a matter of definition—the fact remains that you were not, and very few having recently taken even a little liquor are fit to drive a car.
At the annual meeting of the Ontario Motor League on February 20, 1928, Hon. G. S. Henry, Minister of Highways, said of the record of 1927:
Reckless driving convictions increased from 2,300 to 3,200, and driving while drunk, from 277 to 480.
At the Century Club of Toronto, Mr. J. E. Heth-erington is reported October 8,1927, to have said:
If you would abolish accidents, then you should abolish Government Control. Accidents due to drunkenness have increased tenfold since Government Control was introduced.272 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Magistrate Hopewell of Ottawa is recorded as saying:
The time will come when no man will be given a license to drive an automobile unless he is an abstainer from liquor.
Social Conditions
Alderman A. Desroches declared at a meeting of the Montreal City Council, February 7, 1928:
Arrests for drunkenness in Montreal during 1927 were 50 per cent greater than in 1926. Of late a number of young girls of good families have been found in “dives,” and the evil arises from the “blind pig.”
Justice Coderre, of the Supreme Court in Montreal, after an investigation of the Montreal police, says:
The proof reveals that, in defiance to the by-laws, certain of these establishments (cafes and naturally the least recommend-able, remain open, so to speak, all night long, or at least up to 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. And, consequently, it was precisely at forbidden hours that the greatest disorders took place; alcoholic liquors flowed freely and forsooth at exorbitant prices, denizens of the demi-monde made rendezvous there, and when by chance they would not be found, well, the manager or proprietor of the establishment became very obliging towards his clients, and a telephone call brought them in numbers.FACILITIES UNDER STATE SALE 273
Some of these establishments held licenses granted by the Liquor Commission..
Prostitution itself, commerce in human flesh, in its most shameful form, and most degrading effect, operates and flourishes in Montreal like a perfectly organized commercial enterprise.
From this and other testimony Mr. Spence concludes :
It is an inexorable law, always found operative, that drinking and drunkenness are in proportion to the facilities afforded by which men who drink may obtain liquor. As facilities are increased, use, and the evils consequent upon use, are increased also. There is no gainsaying the fact that compared with Prohibition, under all these Government Sale systems, greater facilities are afforded for sale by the producers and purchases by the consumers, and there has been an enormous increase in the quantity of liquor used, and therefore of the evils which inescapably follow.
It will be recalled that bootleggery broke down the operation of the South Carolina Dispensary Law, which was succeeded by Statewide Prohibition in 1916. That it is a chief problem of the Quebec provincial dispensaries is evidenced from the following extract of the report of the Quebec Liquor Commission, July 1, 1927 :
The number of notorious resorts (Blind Pigs) of the City, definitely closed, has con-274 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
siderably increased, this being due to the efficient work of our Night Raiding Patrol and to the enforcement by the Municipal Police of the “Padlock” Law in certain cases. To the application of this law, we have given all our attention and our entire co-operation.
Night Clubs and Road Houses
Naturally, there still exist in Montreal, as in all large cities, night clubs and other places known as “road houses,” but altogether it might appear impossible to completely abolish them; we are doing our utmost to reduce them to a minimum.
Superhuman efforts were made to have the regulations observed in the country, as is shown by our report entitled “Stills.” During the year, one hundred and sixty-four (164) investigations with reference to stills and seizures were made, as compared to thirty-two (32) the previous year, thus making an increase of one hundred and thirty-two (132). Moreover, our Secret Service Inspectors were occupied verifying all and each of these complaints relating to illicit manufacture received during the year.
Law Loosely Observed in Cities
Even taking into account the great number of stills seized, we consider that the law is more strictly observed in the Rural Districts; and we have come to this conclusion basing ourselves on the fact that fewer cases have been brought up during the last year than during preceding years.ARRESTS IN CANADIAN CITIES
275
Statistical Exhibit fob Montreal and Quebec
Arrests for Drunkenness and Associated Offenses
Police Department
	City of Montreal		City of Quebec	
	1926	1927	1926	1927
Drunkenness		.... 3,165	4,665	886	1,186
Disorderly 		84	113	80*	116*
Breach of the Peace ...	348	388	• • •	• • •
Assault 		212	279	6	6
♦These figures cover Disorderly and Breach of Peace Ar rests in the City of Quebec for 1926 and 1927.
Violations of the Quebec Liquor Law Report of Quebec Liquor Commission
District of Montreal District of Quebec
	1926	1927	1926	1927
Illicit Stills Seized ....	34	164	32	22
Total prosecutions— Liquor offenses 		.... 2,176	2,405	541	928
Complaints 		.... 5,328	5,934	1,752	2,212
Liquor Sales in Quebec
Sale of liquor by the government in government liquor stores began in the Province of Quebec on May 1, 1921. The following statistics are taken from the annual reports of the Quebec Liquor Commission:
Sales in Government Liquor Stores
1921-	2
1922-	3
1923-	4
1924-	5
1925-	6
1926-	7
$15,212,801.21
19,698,773.04
19,812,781.23
17,887,588.19
19,018,299.17
22,425,136.09
Total (6 years) ...............$114,055,378.93
Permits
In 1926-7 permits to sell were granted as follows: Hotels, 561; Taverns, 603; Restaurants, 91; Beer Stores, 1,468; Brew-276 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
eries, 5; Clubs, 125; Steamboats, 11; Dining Cars, 16; Banquets, 90; Trading Posts, 3. Total, 2,973.
The totals since 1921 are as follows:
1921-	2
1922-	3
1923-	4
1924-	5
1925-	6
1926-	7
1,861
2,169
2,399
2,546
2,769
2,973
The steady increase proves the spread of the alcohol habit, even if the annual report claims “the road of progress travelled by our Province toward temperance, commenced in 1920 and constantly followed since, has not been abandoned in 1926.”
Sale by the Breweries
The following statistics from annual reports show the amount of beer manufactured and sold within the Province plus the beer imported from Ontario. A tax of 5 per cent on the price of the beer sold by the breweries to the retailers is paid to the Provincial Treasury. The retail price to the consumers is estimated at 100 per cent advance. This is a low estimate for beer bought by the gallon and sold by the glass:
Year	Gallons Sold Tax Paid On Retail Price
1921-	2 ........ 22,321,348	$15,517,953.97	$31,035,907.95
1922-	3 ........ 22,576,357	13,763,627.47	27,527,254.94
1923-	4 ........ 25,730,377	14,967,340.21	29,934,680.42
1924-	5 ........ 26,690,727	14,866,459.99	29,732,919.98
1925-	6 ........ 26,341,518	17,421,845.29	34,843,690.58
1926-	7 ........ 26,761,356	19,425,837.36	38,851,674.72
Totals _______ 150,381,693	$95,963,064.29 $191,926,128.58
The advance in price in 1926 and 1927 over previous years was due to an agreement between the breweries as to prices. It indicates why Quebec brewers are so prosperous.
Quebec’s Drink Bill
Year Government Stores Beer retailed	Total
1921-	2....... $15,212,801.21	$31,035,907.94	$46,248,709.15
1922-	3 ....... 19,698,773.04	27,527,254.94	47,226,027.98
1923-	4 ....... 19,812,781.23	29,934,680.42	49,747,461.65
1924-	5 ....... 17,887,588.19	29,732,919.98	47,620,508.17
1925-	6 ....... 19,018,299.17	34,843,690.58	53,861,989.75
1926-	7 ....... 22,425,136.09	38,851,674.72	61,276,810.81
Tot (6 yrs.) $114,055,378.93 $191,926,128.58 $305,981,507.51CONVICTIONS FOE DRUNKENNESS 277
CONVICTIONS FOR DRUNKENNESS, ALL PROVINCES, FOR THE YEARS 1876, 1886, 1896, 1906, AND THE YEARS 1916 TO 1925 INCLUSIVE
Years	Prince Edward Island	| Nova Scotia	New Brunswick	Quebec	Ontario	| Manitoba	Saskatch- ewan	Alberta	British ^ Columbia	Yukon	N. W. Territories	Canada
1876	689	98	313	4,378	5,213				383			11,074
1886	359	667	1,290	2,367	5,453	631			• « • • .	389	• .			11,156
1896	129	1,651	1,238	4,275	2,624	573					580		225	11,295
1906	120	2,919	1,843	4,802	7,459	3,905					1,697		2,365	25,110
1916	219	3,614	1,696	7,108	11,728	3,114	1,032	1,809	2,327	53			32,730
1917	207	2,546	1,516	8,025	10,945	1,085	770	391	2,372	25			27,882
1918	96	2,435	704	6,680	7,932	1,123	434	825	778	19			21,026
1919	116	2,879	1,350	7,116	8,498	1,570	618	1,057	1,004	9			24,217
19*20	120	3,140	1,882	11,863	15,021	2,330	919	1,536	2,948	10			39,769
1921	144	2,156	1,264	9,944	14,498	1,429	708	1,838	2,379	2			34,362
1922	162	1,492	1,088	7,103	10,063	1,623	816	1,608	1,081	12			25,048
1923	164	1,392	1,074	6,260	11,370	1,680	884	1,277	1,443	21			25,565
1924	94	1,456	1,176	6,146	12,993	1,948	505	1,464	1,545	11			27,338
1925	112	1,466	1,171	6,342	11,811	1,948	668	1,374	1,844	15			26,751
1926	168	1,898	1,234	5,364	13,752	1,871	487	1,413	2,114	16	10	28,317
♦The sudden increase in 1920 was due to the withdrawal of orders in Council Canadian National Prohibition.
♦To the determined efforts of the breweries and the distilleries to break down Prohibition, when they resumed business.
♦Powerful political influences were exerted to discredit Prohibition in order to obtain “Government Sale.”A BEER RESTAURANT IN MONTREAL
BREWERY TRUCK COMES INTO ITS OWN IN MONTREALINSTEAD OF THE SALOON, THE “TAVERN,” IN MONTREAL
GOVERNMENT DISPENSARIES HAVE NOT ABOLISHED “HOME BREW” IN TORONTOPART II
WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT IT?CHAPTER XVn
CAN PROHIBITION BE REPEALED?
Wet View
Partial repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment is the practical program proposed by Alfred E. Smith in his speech of acceptance at Albany, and urged in behalf of his candidacy to the Presidency in his address at Milwaukee, September 29, 1928. In this speech, as prepared in advance and issued to the press, Governor Smith declared his purpose, if elected, to “lay the matter before every community” he could reach, “and let them make their own decision.” Speaking in behalf of his party, he concluded with the words:	“A sane,
sensible solution can only come from a Democratic victory, because the Democratic Party will give this matter its frank and fearless attention and lay it before the American people as it has never been laid before them.”
Substitute for Prohibition Is Offered,
Governor Smith’s proposal is the first of its kind to be made positive by the outline of a substitute for National Prohibition. In their debate in Boston, April 8,1927, on the question: “Should the Republican National Platform of 1928 advo-
281m PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
cate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment?” Senator William E. Borah asked Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, what substitute Dr. Butler would propose for National Prohibition. The latter had no reply, but took refuge on the negative ground that “Repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, and you go back to the State laws as they existed in 1919.” But in the stenographic report of his Milwaukee speech Governor Smith said:
I further recommend an amendment to the Eighteenth Amendment, and I predicate that recommendation upon the undisputed and indisputable principle of Jeffersonian Democracy, the right of the States themselves to legislate in so far as the exercise of the police power is concerned, particularly where that police power and its exereise is for the habits and the customs of the people. Providing, however, only after a referendum of the people, providing safeguards against its sale in publie places, providing against the open saloon, despised, as of right, by the American people, the Eighteenth Amendment could be so worded as to provide liquor to its own inhabitants.
Under such a system all of the rights of the dry States would be protected to the last degree, and thrown around them would be all the safeguards of the present Prohibition Amendment and the Volstead Act. The dry States should be reasonable about it. They should listen to the State that is not in accordANALYSIS OP SMITH PLAN
283
with their opinion. What would the dry States of this country say if the wet States proposed an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting them from passing any dry law?
Bights of Wet States Asserted
It is this plea that inspires hope that Connecticut or Rhode Island, which failed to ratify the Prohibition Amendment, can reopen the case rejected by the United States Supreme Court on the score of the constitutionality of the amendment. Archibald E. Stevenson, lawyer and authority on constitutional questions, says in Current History for July, 1928:
The decision of the Court on constitutional questions is not the law. The Constitution itself, whence the court derives its power, is the law. Hence a dissenting State which has not been a party to an action involving the validity of the Eighteenth Amendment may raise the issue anew and compel the court to hear its arguments. Connecticut is such a State.
But Governor Smith makes an advance on Dr. Butler’s proposal of complete repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and going “back to the State laws as they existed in 1919.” The Governor’s plan retains, for such States as elect to remain dry, prohibition of the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within such States, and of their importation into them and284 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
exportation from them. It retains the present guaranty of the Eighteenth Amendment, so far as it can be made to apply to those States with concurrent Federal legislation and enforcement.
It retains for all States, both wet and dry, the abolition of the privately conducted saloon and substitutes, in the case of the wet States, the State-owned and State-run dispensary system of the Canadian provinces.
It gives the right to every State that wishes it, after a popular referendum, as Governor Smith describes it in his speech of acceptance, to “import, manufacture or cause to be manufactured, and sell, alcoholic beverages, the sale to be made only by the State itself and not for consumption in any public place.”
Governor Smith Makes a Promise
This is the degree of partial repeal which the national Democratic leader believes the people are now ready to consider, to the extent of electing him to the Presidency. In that event he explicitly promises to recommend the proposed amendment to Congress, and, by an active personal and party campaign, to lay the matter before every community in the country. It will then, he says, be “for the people and the representatives in the National and State legislatures to determine whether these changes shall be made.”
Can the Eighteenth Amendment, be partly re-ASSURES DISRESPECT FOR LAW
285
pealed by the method which Governor Smith has made a major issue in the Presidential campaign of 1928!
The Governor states the reasons for his belief in its practicability in his speech of acceptance. He says:
In a book, “Law and Its Origin,” recently called to my notice, James 0. Carter, one of the leaders of the bar of this country, wrote of the conditions which exist “when a law is made declaring conduct widely practiced and widely regarded as innocent to be a crime.” He points out that in the enforcement of such a law “trials become scenes of perjury and subornation of perjury”; “juries find abundant excuses for rendering acquittal or persisting in disagreement contrary to their oaths,” and he concludes, “Perhaps worst of all is that general regard and reverence for law are impaired,” “a consequence the mischief of which can scarcely be estimated.” These words, written years before the Eighteenth Amendment or the Volstead Act, were prophetic of our situation to-day.
Appeals in Behalf of Parents
I believe in temperance. We have not achieved temperance under the present system. The mothers and fathers of young men and young women throughout this land know the anxiety and worry which has been brought to them by their children’s use of liquor in a286 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
way which was unknown before Prohibition. I believe in reverence for law. To-day disregard of the Prohibition laws is insidiously sapping respect for all law. I raise, therefore, what I profoundly believe to be a great moral issue involving the righteousness of our national conduct and the protection of our children’s morals.
The remedy, as I have stated, is the fearless application of Jeffersonian principles. Jefferson and his followers foresaw the complex activities of this great, widespread country. They knew that in rural, sparsely settled districts people would develop different desires and customs from those in densely populated sections and that if we were to be a nation united on truly national matters, there had to be a differentiation in local laws to allow for different local habits. It was for this reason that the Democratic platform in 1884 announced, “We oppose sumptuary laws which vex the citizens and interfere with individual liberty,’’ and it was for this reason that Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act.
In his prepared address at Milwaukee the Governor said:
I have attempted to paint two pictures: First, the picture of the effect of these laws upon the morals of our youth, and, second, the real facts and the real condition, which I claim must be known to the officials of the Government. I have taken considerable timeREPUBLICAN PARTY’S ANSAVER
287
to lay this before you in detail, but I could not make a better job of it than to quote what President Harding said about it:
“Constitutional Prohibition has been adopted by the nation. It is the supreme law of the land. In plain speaking, there are conditions relating to its enforcement which savor of a nationwide scandal. It is the most demoralizing factor in our public life. ’ ’
Let it be said to bis credit that President Harding was the one man in a high official position in Washington who was prepared to concede that it was the demoralizing factor in our public life.
What is the answer of the Republican Party to all of this? In the face of this record the platform glosses over the whole thing by quoting the words of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and again pledges itself and its nominees to the observance and vigorous enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment; no truth, no candor, not even common honesty. And all of this from a party that for eight years has tried as best it could to be all things to all men. Senator Gore, of Oklahoma, in a speech at Omaha recently summed it up in a few words when he said that the Republican policy was to give the liquor to the wets and give the law to the drys.
The Republican candidate, speaking on the subject, said the following:
‘ ‘ Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. It288 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
must be worked out constructively. Common sense compels us to realize that grave abuses have occurred—abuses which must be remedied. ’ ’
Governor Smith thereafter speaks of a searching investigation.
Let me show you a complete record of a searching inquiry made only two years ago, comprising 1,700 pages of testimony, all of which, for reasons of political expediency, were disregarded. What is the plain common sense of this whole proposition!
Millions of people in this country do not agree with Mr. Hoover that this is a noble experiment. You could get no better testimony for that than to look at the result of the refer-endums in so many of our thickly populated States.
Referendum^ Frown on Prohibition
While it is true that some of the States of the nation have voted against change in the present system, it is at the same time true that in the large populous States the result is the other way, as is evidenced by the referendums.
In New York, people out of sympathy with the law, in a popular election, expressed it by over 1,000,000 majority. In Illinois, by 284,-000 majority. In Wisconsin, by 171,000 majority. In Nevada, by 8,300 majority, and in Montana, by 10,249 majority.
The point is that a great army of the American people oppose these laws. Nobody can say that that is a healthy conditionOUTLINE OF WET PICTUKE
¿89
in our democracy. Nobody can say that people like ours are comfortable when so many of our thinking citizens resist the attempt on the part of the government to regulate their conduct by law. The natural result of it is the breeding throughout the length and breadth of the country of a disrespect for all law. Nobody can gainsay the fact that the Prohibition law and the Volstead Act have found a new line of endeavor for the underworld; they brought to life the bootleggers, and the bootleggers begot the hijackers, and the hijackers the racketeers, so that gangland is interested in the maintenance of Prohibition because by its operation they are benefited.
As far as my time permits me to-night I have painted for you the picture. In my speech of acceptance I suggested a remedy.
The details of the picture to which Governor Smith refers are carefully filled in, in that half of the first part of this book which constitutes the Wet View. It expresses, by representative Wet opinion of the facts, the reasons why Governor Smith’s program is deemed practicable.
Dev View
Under the head of “Fallacies in Governor Smith’s Proposal,” Dr. E. Y. Mullins, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, of Louisville, Ky., says:
Perhaps the most moving point in Gover-290 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
nor Smith’s acceptance address was the picture he gave of fathers ’ and mothers ’ anxiety over their drinking sons and daughters to-day under the “evils of Prohibition.” The comforting remedy he offers them for this terrible evil, is more drink, more easily reached.
The present generation seems to think this special anxiety of parents a new thing in the history of our country. To one who has lived his life of considerably more than half a century in the United States the picture is not a new one. Prom earliest recollection the towns in which I lived as a youth had their full quota of parents anxious over drinking sons —and even then sometimes over drinking daughters.
“Keep Liquor Away from Them”
These years of past family history in connection with liquor ought to teach us something. I firmly believe if all the grieving parents of drinking children of the past were asked if “more drink more easily reached” were the remedy, there would ring out a ghostly cry of “No” loud enough to be heard the world round. For the cry that went up from these anguished parents in this life was “Keep liquor away from them.”
The temperance pledge won a few. With the many it was a broken reed. It was this cry of “Keep liquor away from them” which echoed and reechoed until Congress and forty-six of the forty-eight States brought Prohibition in overwhelmingly.CRY OF “MORE LIQUOR”
291
Now I would put this record of parental agony through fully a half-century of American history—its travail and achievement— over against the checkered experience of eight years in enforcing this law which has caused Governor Smith to seek to comfort anxious parents with the battle cry of “more liquor more easily reached.”
Looking back over the past I recall some parents who moved to the country that liquor might not be so easily reached, but, alas, the horse and buggy soon carried the thirsty boys to town. Would Governor Smith’s program of State determination of the wet and dry issue give relief to anxious parents? With the motor-car at hand, would State border lines give dry communities one iota of protection? And does anybody with common sense believe that a checkered map with wet and dry States would rid the country of bootleggers ?
For the sake of anxious parents of drinking children, Governor Smith proposes as soon as possible to increase the supply and availability of liquor by modifying the Volstead Act, and later to undo completely the “evil of Prohibition” by repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Such is the happy program.
Forty-six States Hard to Move
I wonder if it has occurred to Governor Smith that forty-six out of forty-eight States might be hard to move. Having spent half a century in moving forward toward a great292 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
moral achievement, could they be turned back by so fallacious an argument as more drink? True reforms never go backward.
In anticipation of such questions as that put by Dr. Mullins, Walter Lippmann, chief editorial writer of The New York World, which urges Governor Smith’s candidacy, admits unhesitatingly that the Eighteenth Amendment cannot be repealed. Mr. Lippmann says, in Harper’s Magazine for December, 1926:
It is true, for example, that the Eighteenth Amendment cannot be repealed. In order to repeal it there would be required two-thirds of the Senate and two-thirds of the House, and a majority of both houses in 37 States. A repeal could, therefore, be vetoed by 33 Senators, or by 146 Representatives, or by a majority in 13 State Senates. A repeal might pass Congress, it might pass 35 Legislatures, it might pass one house in the remaining 13 Legislatures, and still the Eighteenth Amendment would be intact. As long as Prohibition has a majority in one branch of the Legislature in 13 States a repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment is impossible. Repeal would have to be fought for in 96 State legislative bodies and the two houses of Congress. Out of these 98 law-making bodies, 13 in 13 separate States possess an absolute veto.
It is also true that the Volstead Act cannot be liberalized without nullifying the intent of this immutable Eighteenth Amendment. ThereAN IMPRACTICABLE PROGRAM
293
is no slightest doubt that the Amendment was intended to prohibit the lightest beer and the lightest wine no less than gin and absinthe. We, therefore, arrive by irresistible logic at the conclusion that the Volstead Act itself is immutable.
Thus in advance, and by irresistible logic, Mr. Lippmann scouted the practicability of Governor Smith’s entire program, except by the avenue of nullification. He admitted that Prohibition cannot be repealed. His logic applies just as irresistibly to any attempt to bring about a partial repeal. Thirteen out of 98 law-making bodies in forty-eight States could defeat partial Prohibition, and doubtless most or all of these thirteen can be found in the Democratic Solid South.
But is it not altogether probable that a majority of the States and a majority of Congress would reject Governor Smith’s proposals?
Legislative Majority Votes Dry
In the chapter on the state of public sentiment regarding Prohibition it is shown at length how, while a few popular referendums, without binding effect on National or State governments, were declaring for a change in the Prohibition law in 1926—largely because the dry organizations instructed their following not to vote in these referendums—the States were returning to Congress an overwhelming majority of dry Representatives294: PKOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOBST
and Senators, specifically pledged to resist any attempt to weaken the Volstead Act.
If the youth of the nation were imperiled by the Prohibition laws, one would expect the Young Men’s Christian Associations, and Christian Endeavor Societies, and the churches to range themselves behind Governor Smith in his plea for more liquor. Instead, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, representing over 19,000,000 communicants, declared through its Executive Committee on January 23,1928, that the “Federal Prohibition Amendment was not the result of a sudden wave of hysteria or of unreasoning fanaticism, as is frequently erroneously declared, but was adopted, as the President officially states, ‘after more than two generations of constant debate.’” It adds:
The crux of the situation is not, therefore, whether the purpose and the possibilities for good of the Prohibition law are to be approved, but the practical burning issue to-day is whether the law shall be properly observed and enforced. .	.	. For wherever the
Prohibition law has been observed and enforced the manifold good results far exceed the expectations of its friends. Observance and enforcement of the Prohibition law must be twin goals of our immediate continuous endeavor. .	.	. The Prohibition law is
one of the highest products of Christian citizenship in the realm of social legislation.FAIRNESS TO WET STATES
295
Religious Organisations Favor Dry Lew
In like terms the Young Men’s Christian Associations of North America, the International Society of Christian Endeavor, the Salvation Army, the great charitable organizations and agencies of social service have for the most part recorded themselves in support of the Amendment.
But if a majority of the States and the moral elements of the community are in favor of retaining the Eighteenth Amendment, what of the rights of the wet States ? Governor Smith asks: “What would the dry States of this country say if the wet States proposed an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting them from passing any dry law?” In a debate with Gabriel Wells:, of New York, William Allen WTiite answers a similar question:
You ask if I think that, under the principles of a democracy, one section of the country should take on itself to dictate to another section in the matter of personal habits. That presumes that New York and the New England States did not ratify the amendment themselves and that their Congressmen did not participate in drafting the Volstead Act. They did. They must either say that they were deceived or else that they have changed their minds.
The Question of Fair Play Now do you think it fair that one section296 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
of the country go in with another section of the country in ratifying an amendment to the Constitution, working a law through Congress and then declaring that they have nothing to do with the law and therefore shift the responsibility upon the other sections of the country? It is fair enough to say that New York and the Seaboard States have now concluded that they will not obey the Constitution, but to say that they had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment is hardly a dignified attitude in view of the facts.
Your second question asks if I think it wise that a Constitution should contain a provision which makes for disunion. Supposing we rampant radicals out in the West should decide that the provisions of the Constitution referring to the rights of property did not conform to our ideals of morality and economic advantage. How quickly would the guns of the republic be turned upon the recalcitrant Westerners. When a principle of government has got into the Constitution with the full knowledge and co-operation of all sections, it seems to me that all sections should endeavor to obey the Constitution and not try to justify their afterthoughts.
The question whether we should have Prohibition with surreptitious drinking or nom-Prohibition with regulated drinking does not, it seems to me, make much difference. Under the Eighteenth Amendment w'e have abolished the saloon. I don’t think that the bootlegger at his worst is as bad as the saloon at its best, and I feel that very soon, that is to say, withinSATISFACTION OF DEY STATES
297
a generation, the situation as it touches the enforcement of the law will gradually grow better.
All legislation is sumptuary, whether it restricts the rights of those who would commit murder, rape, arson or endanger public health or public safety. As our civilization grows more complex of necessity our liberties must he restricted. The only question to decide when a new law is proposed is whether or not it returns in social benefit sufficient economic advantage to warrant the restriction of liberty.
Dry States Confirmed in Their Dryness
Mr. White’s views are representative of the people in most of the States who year after year elect preponderant majorities of drys to the State Legislatures and to Congress. These millions of people are becoming more set in their views. In an article headed “How Long Can Prohibition Last?” John Holley Clark, Jr., formerly an assistant Federal prosecutor in New York, presents an intensive study of the history of Prohibition in World’s Work for April, 1928. The progressive satisfaction of the voters with the Prohibition law is unmistakably shown in the following words :
The Association Opposed to the Prohibition Amendment claims that in the Seventieth Congress there are 129 wet votes out of a total of 531. Of these, 106, it claims, are in the House in a total membership of 435, and298 PBOHIBITIOU STILL AT ITS WOBST
23 votes are in the Senate, whose membership is 96. The table below classifies the States according to the number of years they have been under Prohibition and gives for each classification the number of wet votes it is claimed there will be in Congress.
			Wet	Per cent
	Age		votes in of total	
States	of law		Congress States	
New York, Maryland, Mon-				
tana, Nevada		No law		43	33
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania 4 years			24	19
New Jersey, Rhode Island.. Connecticut, Louisiana, Yer-	5	»1	10	8
mont, Wisconsin, Illinois.	6	»»	26	20
California, Kentucky	 Delaware, Minnesota, Wyo-	7	tt	8	7
ming, Missouri	 Florida, Indiana, New Hamp-	S	it	7	5
shire, New Mexico, Texas, Ohio		9	it	5	4
Utah 	 Michigan, Nebraska, South	10	it	1	1
Carolina, South Dakota,
Virginia................11	”	5	4
Alabama, Arkansas, Color-
ado, Idaho, Iowa..........12	”	0
Arizona, Oregon, West Vir-
ginia, Washington		.13	a	0
Tennessee 		.15	>i	0
Mississippi, North Carolina	19	it	0
Georgia, Oklahoma		.20	it	0
North Dakota		.38	99	0
Kansas 		.47	it	0
Maine 		.72	it	0
From this table it will be seen that of the 129 wet votes, 43, or 33 per cent, come from States that have no law. An additional 34, making a total of 60 per cent, come from States whose laws are five years old or less ; and 123, or 95 per cent, come from States.REPEAL IS IMPOSSIBLE
399
whose laws are less than ten years old. There are no wet votes from any of the 17 States whose laws are more than eleven years old. These figures certainly indicate, first, that there is now practically no effective wet sentiment in any State whose law is more than ten years old; second, that wet sentiment decreases as the laws get older.
It seems certain, therefore, that the Eighteenth Amendment cannot be repealed, in whole or in part.CHAPTER XVIII
CAN PROHIBITION BE MODIFIED OR NULLIFIED?
Wet View
In his address of acceptance and in his Milwaukee speech, Governor Smith appeals both to the influential body of the wets who believe that the Eighteenth Amendment can be repealed and to those who believe that Prohibition can at least be modified through amendment of the Volstead Act, as indicated in the last chapter. Walter Lipp-mann, chief editorial writer of The New York World, the leading press sponsor of Governor Smith’s candidacy, frankly expresses in Harper’s Monthly for December, 1926, his disbelief in the practicability of repeal and declares that the Prohibition law and the amendment on which it is based should be nullified. It is a blunt statement. It sums up the policy of Governor Smith and his following. ‘ ‘ The fat is in the fire, ’ ’ says Mr. Lipp-mann, and he continues:
The Eighteenth Amendment is unrepeal-able and the human resentment against it un-repealable. Once again, as they have several times in the past, a considerable part of the American people find themselves in a constitutional straitjacket out of which they will
300BUSINESS OP WRIGGLING FREE
301
have somehow to wriggle free. This business of wriggling free is sometimes called nullification. Technically, nullification is practiced when a State makes it a crime to enforce a particular Federal law. Technically, therefore, the rebellion against the Eighteenth Amendment is not nullification.
Object Is to Nullify the Intent
But that the object of the movement against the Eighteenth Amendment is to nullify the intent of the authors of the Amendment, no candid man can deny. They meant to prohibit all intoxicating liquors throughout the United States. It is the intention of the wets to legalize some or all intoxicating liquors in those States where a majority desires it. That is the objective. The method may be a gradual failure to enforce the law in wet territory, and the reduction of the Eighteenth Amendment to the status of some of the old unrepealed Blue Sunday legislation. The method may be an amendment to the Volstead Act permitting each State to define intoxicating liquor. Many methods are likely to be employed. Their purpose is to change the practical effect of the Eighteenth Amendment even though its language remains the same.
Only those who have read American history through rose-colored glasses will be shocked at this prospect. This is a normal and traditional American method of circumventing the inflexibility of the Constitution. When the Constitution has come into conflict with the living needs of the nation, and when302 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
amendment was impossible, the method of changing the Constitution has been to change it and then get the very human Supreme Court to sanction it. The Constitution gives the Presidential electors the right to use their discretion in the choice of a President. They have lost that right. Yet the Constitution has never been amended to take away that right. The Constitution says that no man shall be Senator who is not thirty years old. Henry Clay entered the Senate at twenty-nine ; Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., was younger than thirty when he was elected. The Constitution says that Representatives shall be apportioned according to population as determined by a census every ten years. There has been no new apportionment for sixteen years. The provision that slaves should be delivered up on demand was consistently nullified by many Northern States. The provision that the President shall make treaties only with the advice and consent of the Senate was disregarded in important instances both by Roosevelt and Wilson. The Fourteenth Amendment in so far as it provides a penalty for denial of the right to vote is dead. The Fifteenth Amendment is nullified in most if not all the Southern States. If then the Eighteenth Amendment is somehow nullified in certain Northern States, there will be nothing novel or revolutionary about it. .	.	.
The moral is plain. If liquor is legalized in the States which desire it, all that is necessary to make it constitutional is for the Supreme Court, bowing to public opinion, toALCOHOLIC LIQUORS NOT PROHIBITED 303
find by the proper reasoning that the States are not violating the Eighteenth Amendment. Then they will not be violating it. They will be violating what the authors of it meant. But the Constitution, thank heavens, means whatever a living Supreme Court says it means. And the Supreme Court, thank heavens, is composed on the whole not of worshipers of a sacred text, but of jurists and statesmen and human beings.
Would Define Intoxicating Content
This statement defines plainly as nullification the proposal that each State be permitted to define the content of intoxicating liquor in a manner that will please the wets. There are other methods. Whatever the method, it is regarded as settled that ultimately the Supreme Court will bow to the popular will. In his speech at Milwaukee, as prepared in advance for the press, Governor Smith referred to his acceptance address and made this argument for the method of modification:
I recommend an amendment to the Volstead Act which should contain a sane and sensible definition of what constitutes an intoxicating beverage, because upon its face the present definition does not square with common sense or with medical opinion. Each State could then provide for an alcoholic content not greater than that fixed by Congress.
It must be borne in mind that the Eighteenth Amendment does not prohibit alcoholic304 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
beverages, it prohibits intoxicating beverages. And no sensible man can truthfully be prepared to say that one-half of 1 per cent of alcohol constitutes an intoxicant.
I firmly and honestly believe that a great deal of the dangerous and poisonous hard liquor would be driven out of this country if the people could be assured of an alcoholic beverage declared by common sense and by science to be non-intoxicating.
Wets Generally Would Nullify
Such is the measure of immediate relief proposed by Governor Smith, to be followed by partial repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. No voice has been raised among representative wets against the usual construction of such measures as part of a general policy of nullification. For example, Philip Dexter, in the Century Magazine for July, 1928, says in his article “On Prohibition: The Conflict Between American Law and Customs”:
In time, with increasing industrialization, the cities will overcome the farmers. Whether they will repeal the Eighteenth Amendment or will devise some method of ignoring it where the people object to it and observing it where the people wish it to be observed, time will tell; but one or the other is almost a certainty.
So also, in his book, “The A B C of Prohibi-CALL IT NULLIFICATION
305
tion,” the argument for nullification recurs in this statement by Fabian Franklin:
Now what are we to do about an article of the Constitution that results in so horrible a situation? “Enforce it or repeal it,” many people say. It is an easy thing to say. But suppose we can’t repeal it? Suppose that the more rigorously you enforce it, the more odious become the means of enforcement? Should we sacrifice everything we hold dear for the sake of persisting in forcing this measure upon a vast minority, very likely an actual majority, of the people?
No, besides enforcement and repeal there is another course. Call it nullification if you will; there are times when a course for which we have perhaps no better name than nullification is the only remedy for intolerable evil or intolerable wrong. Such was the case with the Fugitive Slave Law; such was the case with the Negro Suffrage Amendments in the South. Whether by formal nullification through the State Legislatures or by the direct action of the people, these laws were practically nullified, one of them in the North, the other in the South. In the case of Prohibition we have to look squarely in the face the fact that, whether we like it or not, we are going to have nullification of the one kind or the other. Either Congress must give us relief by some form of what all good Prohibitionists will call nullification, or we must continue to have the nullification that we now have by the spontaneous action of tens of306 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
millions of individual Americans, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.
Christian Martyrs Were Nullifiers
In “The Prohibition Mania,” by Clarence Dar-row and Victor S. Yarros, the badness of the law prohibiting intoxicants is compared with the badness of the Roman laws against Christianity, and nullification is urged as a duty similar to the duty of defiance of anti-Christian laws by the martyrs of the Church. Messrs. Darrow and Yarros say:
Even a short and utterly inadequate sketch of the method employed by the people in modifying or overthrowing unjust constitutional provisions and statutes ought to be illuminating.
Most laws grow out of the customs and habits of the people. When they do grow out of such customs and habits, they are generally easy to enforce, because most people have already conformed to the idea. Now and then a law or a constitutional provision is placed upon the books that has never received popular approval. In that case, there is a constant conflict, until the constitutional provision or law becomes a dead letter, or until the people are convinced by reason and judgment or subdued by tyranny and oppression. This kind of modification can be traced as far back as we wish to go. Christianity in its early years was taken to the Roman Empire. It met with all sorts of oppositionTHE PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS
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and most stringent laws. Penalties for teaching or professing Christianity, like the penalties attaching to most religious laws, were cruel and severe, including death in every hideous form, by torture, by wild beasts, and by burning. The Christians, however, did not obey the law. Had they done so, Christianity would never have spread to Western Europe or become the prevailing religion of the United States.
For several hundred years, not only in Rome, but throughout Europe, Christians suffered death and torture because they would not obey the law. Many of these were citizens of the country where the persecutions raged, but no one except the rulers ever urged the doctrine that whatever the law, it is the duty of a citizen to obey.
Later, under the Inquisition, for three or four hundred years, Christians were persecuted by other Christians. They were persecuted and put to death in fiendish ways, because they would not obey the law and worship in a special way. Many millions of human beings were put to death by the judgments of courts and by war, for maintaining their right to think for themselves, in spite of statutes. When Protestantism finally triumphed in Great Britain, the same sort of laws were passed against Catholics, who did as men of intelligence and courage will always do, stand up for their freedom to worship as they pleased; and, in spite of fire and sword and death in every conceivable way, they refused to obey the law.308 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
In the wet view, therefore, as interpreted by Messrs. Darrow and Yarros, nullification is the instrument of a holy crusade in the cause of indulgence in narcotic beverages, to be employed with the same zeal as inspired the early Christian martyrs. Theirs is an extreme statement of a doctrine of nullification of the Eighteenth Amendment and its supporting laws which, in the settled judgment of the wets, is already in progress by the “spontaneous action of tens of millions of individual Americans.” They believe and hope that such action will be followed by Congress and the courts by further measures countenancing nullification or relaxing the interpretation placed on the word “intoxicating” as imbedded in the Constitution. In behalf of this policy of relaxation, Governor Smith, as acknowledged leader of the wets, bases his appeal to the country.
Dby View
The testimony of the wets confirms the statement made by Herbert Hoover in his address accepting the Republican nomination for the Presidency:	“Modification of the enforcement laws
which permit that which the Constitution forbids is nullification.” But far from ranking Prohibition with the Roman laws against Christianity, the medieval laws supporting the Inquisition and the laws supporting the institution of slavery, Mr. Hoover calls Prohibition a “great social and eco-NOT A CASE OP MARTYRDOM
309
nomic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” and Bishop Manning, after saying that it has the overwhelming approval of the people, declares that “judged by its results on the whole, it is a good law”; that it is “one of the greatest efforts toward moral and social betterment that has ever been made.”
Efforts to engender disrespect for such a law and to bring about its nullification may not be justified by the example set by the early Christian martyrs.
Beds and Other Law Defiers
Senator William E. Borah properly characterized such efforts in an article in the Century Magazine for October, 1927, when he said that the foreign radical who comes here and openly defies our Constitution is a “most unworthy creature,” but is “not so reprehensible” as the man born and reared in this country who disregards or defies some law or amendment “because it runs counter to his personal interests, personal views or personal vices.”
Many persons of property who are most agitated about foreign radical propaganda, Mr. Borah continues, are “the most pronounced, insistent and persistent violators of the Eighteenth Amendment.” He adds:
The hotbed, the scouting, noisy rendezvous of lawlessness, of cynical defiance to the310 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Eighteenth Amendment, is among those of social standing, of large property interests, and in the wealthier homes. Without their patronage, protection and example, the bootlegger could easily be brought within the control of the law.
The propertied classes who violate the Eighteenth Amendment, Senator Borah continues, are also undermining the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which protect life and property, because that which undermines any part of the Constitution undermines it all. He says:
The Bed sits in his darkly lighted room, around his poorly laden table, and denounces the provisions of the Constitution placed there to protect property. The “white” sits in his brilliantly lighted room about his richly laden table and defies or denounces the provisions of the Constitution placed there in the belief that they would protect the home. I leave it to all good citizens whether it is not true that both are traveling the road to lawlessness, both sowing the seed of destruction, both undermining the whole fabric of law and order.
“Obedience to law because it is law,” he declares, is the primary need of Americans to-day. “We do not need a new faith,” he asserts; “we need the simplicity, the directness, and the selfsurrender of the old. Throughout the land weWEALTHY EVADERS OF LAW
311
need to preach, the creed of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln with a tongue of fire.”
“An Old Man’s View” for Violation
Because these wealthy violators of the intent of the Eighteenth Amendment and their bootleggers would be convenienced by nullification they preach it. They exaggerate the evils that have resulted from the first and experimental operations of the law, most of which are due to their own lack of its observance. They make it appear that the youth of the land agree with what Bishop Manning calls “an old man’s view” of Prohibition, and themselves universally flout it. Then they make a religion of their vices and play the “martyr act” in the holy cause of more liquor. Thus they justify employment of every possible measure of legal evasion and violation. It is of these that Mr. Hoover speaks in his acceptance address :
Modification of the enforcement laws which permit that which the Constitution forbids is nullification. This the American people will not countenance. Change in the Constitution can and must be brought about only by the straightforward methods provided in the Constitution itself.
There are those who do not believe in the purposes of several provisions of the Constitution. No one denied their right to seek to amend it. They are not subject to criticism312 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
for asserting that right. But the Republican party does deny the right of anyone to seek to destroy the purposes of the Constitution by indirection.
Did the Fathers Die for Drinker’s Right?
“Did the Fathers die for the right to drink?” Nolan R. Best asks in his book, “Yes, ‘It's the Law’ and It’s a Good Law,” published under the auspices of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. Mr. Best adds :
Surely, in order to lift these matters to the high level of a freeman’s rights, there must be exposed some tangible enlargement of God-created human life which is being frustrated by law-made hindrances. Show that, and the red fiber of manly independence will quiver into revolt to-day just as surely as in the times of the American Revolution. And there will be churchmen, Prohibitionists and even “moral fanatics” among the insurgents too.
But what have any of Prohibition’s antagonists to bring forward substantial and actual enough to heat the patriot blood with any such indignation?
To what puerilities a straight-seeing and straight-thinking observer must feel himself dragged down when, to support the accusation that liberty is being crushed out of this country, the specification of fact offered is the awful complaint that one can no longer find a dram of liquor to drink without patronizing a bootlegger!RECORD OE A WET PAST
313
It is admitted by the Drys that the cause of nullification would be incalculably advanced by the placing in the highest executive office of the nation of a man whose entire record in public life has been on the side of the saloon and on the side of spreading disrespect and contempt for the Constitution. Alfred E. Smith is unquestionably such a man. In the Declaration of Principles, Purposes and Program of the Conference of Dry Anti-Smith Democrats held at Asheville, N. C., July 19,1928, his record is described as follows :
Governor Smith’s entire record is wet. He was an advocate and defender of saloons while they existed, for he repeatedly put his “foot on the brass rail and blew the foam off the glass,” for he has openly expressed his desire to help repeal the Prohibition laws, so that it can be done again.
Governor Smith's Record
Mr. Smith works not only for repeal, but for modification and nullification. The declaration continues :
As a legislator, he not only opposed measures to restrict the privileges of saloons, but endeavored to remove existing restrictions. He fought in pre-prohibition days every effort to extend the application of the principle of local option, which principle he so vociferously advocates to-day. He fought the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, and has bitterly criticized the Legislature of New314 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
York, ■which, did ratify the same. He fought the passage of the Mullan-Gage State Law Enforcement Code, and after that code had been enacted by the New York State Legislature, he labored aggressively and persistently until he had secured its repeal. He is responsible for the ineffective enforcement of Prohibition in the great State of New York, and for the horrible vice conditions, which the Committee on Vice has recently reported to be worse in New York City than they have been for the past twenty-five years.
He advocated the passage of the 2.75 beer bill, which the United States Supreme Court declared to be unconstitutional, and he urged the holding of a futile referendum to permit each State to determine what shall be the legal content of the beverages permitted to be manufactured and sold. Although sworn to maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States, including the Eighteenth Amendment, his whole course has been such as to nullify the Eighteenth Amendment as far as possible in the State of New York. If he interprets his oath (which he has taken four times as Governor of the State of New York) to defend the Constitution of the United States in such fashion, how can he be expected to put any different interpretation on the oath which he will be obliged to take as President of the United States to maintain and defend exactly the same Constitution?
Mr. Smith’s course since his nomination to the Presidency has been consistent with his record.A WET PRESIDENT’S DILEMMA
315
He caused to be appointed Chairman of the Democratic National Committee John J. Raskob, the Vice Chairman of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Immediately Mr. Raskob declared that he had accepted the position of manager of Governor Smith’s campaign because he saw “an opportunity of performing some constructive service by helping relieve the country of the damnable affliction of Prohibition.”
Do We Want a Liquor President?
That statement was hardly calculated to give aid and comfort to those who are opposed to nullification. Bishop James Cannon, Jr., Chairman of the Commission on Temperance and Social Service of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, asks :
Do the American people to-day want a man to be elected as President who does not only personally not believe in the principle of Prohibition which has been written into the Constitution, but who, although he would be compelled in taking the oath of the office as President to swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States, yet would continue to indulge his appetite for strong drink, and of necessity in the indulgence of that appetite be compelled to transport a stock of intoxicants from his private residence to the White House, or would be compelled to indulge his appetite by visiting regularly his friends in Washington who might possibly have stocked316 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
their wines in other cellars before the Prohibition Amendment became effective, or who would be obliged to purchase such intoxicants from persons who in selling to him would be violating the Constitution which he, as President, had solemnly sworn to uphold?
Assuredly the election of such a candidate, backed by the public record of Governor Smith, would not tend to increase respect for the law or to prevent a rapid progress toward nullification. The issue is clearly drawn. The event of the Presidential election of 1928 will show whether the enemies of Prohibition can reasonably look forward to an affirmative answer to the question: “Can Prohibition be modified or nullified?”CHAPTER XIX
CAN PROHIBITION BE ENFORCED?
"Wet View
President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, who is a member of the Moderation League, Inc., of New York, despairs of Prohibition enforcement. Commenting on the declarations of the Republican platform and of Herbert Hoover, Republican nominee for the Presidency, in behalf of enforcement, Dr. Butler said in a letter to The New York Times of August 20, 1928 :
Anyone who is opposed to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and who is also opposed to that process of statutory obsolescence that is now called nullification, must then be in favor of their only alternative, which is the continuance of the present reign of lawlessness, debauchery and government-made crime. Every bootlegger in the land will support this position, both with eagerness and with a share of his very satisfactory profits.
Thè parrot-like cry for law enforcement means somewhat less than nothing, and, as the Irishman said, not much of that. The facts being what they are, to declare for law enforcement in respect to the Eighteenth Amendment is to declare for lawlessness and for a continuous and organized assault, under
317318 PKOHIBITIOH STILL AT ITS WOBST
official protection, upon the foundation of our Government. It means what Mr. Justice Holmes, speaking from the bench of the United States Supreme Court, has properly called “dirty business.”
What I wish to make entirely plain is that no candidate of my party for the Presidency can commit me or countless others like me to any such doctrines or to any such policies.
Enforcement vs. Bill of Rights
In his address at St. Louis, Mo., December 14, 1927, Dr. Butler had given notice of his position as follows:
So far as I am concerned, Mr. Chairman, no candidate for public office in 1928 is going to he permitted to hide himself behind the papier-mache bulwark of law enforcement. The phrase “law enforcement” sounds as if it meant something, but it does not. I myself question very much whether any law can be enforced, because it really does not enforce a law to punish those who violate it. Laws must be respected and obeyed, and when they are not respected and obeyed, they cease to be laws, no matter what name you put on them. Just a word about this “law enforcement” as a political slogan. If law enforcement means the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment regardless of any other provision of the Constitution, then law enforcement means lawlessness. It means the kind of murder that has been going on over this land for four years. It means the inva-CEY OF LAW ENFORCEMENT
319
sion of the right of privacy; it means search without warrant; it means the abolition or limitation of trial by jury. It means overturning all sorts of things which we have supposed to be fundamental, if by law enforcement you mean—get my condition—enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, regardless of the Bill of Bights or anything else. Abraham Lincoln had something to say about thai also. On July 4, 1861, in his message to the Congress, he asked this question: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Why, Mr. Chairman, Lincoln could not have framed a question more pertinent to the issues of this moment. But suppose law enforcement does not mean that; suppose law enforcement means the enforcement equally of all the laws that are in the Constitution. Then the cry of “law enforcement” is sheer hypocrisy and cowardice, because under those conditions the Eighteenth Amendment cannot be enforced and every intelligent man must know it.
Laws Enforced by Willingness
The wet view of the proper basis for law enforcement is further defined in “The A B C of Prohibition, ’ ’ by Fabian Franklin, by a quotation from Arthur T. Hadley, President Emeritus of Yale University, as follows:
Who enforces the laws?
The first impulse of most people would be820 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
to answer, “The police and the sheriffs, with occasional assistance from the army in emergencies.” But if we stop to think about the matter we shall see that this is a very superficial view of things, and that only a small fraction of our law enforcement is secured or needs to be secured in this way. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred obedience to the law is quite voluntary. The people at large do not have to be Compelled by the police to obey the laws against murder or burglary or the various regulations for the convenience of the public. They do it of themselves, either as a matter of conscience or in deference to public opinion. And the fact that they do it of themselves is the thing which makes civilized society possible. It enables the police to concentrate their attention on the work of protecting the public against a relatively small number of habitual lawbreakers who do not recognize their moral obligations to themselves or to society. Conscience and public opinion enforce the laws; the police suppress the exceptions.
“The bottom reason,” Mr. Franklin comments, “of the frightful mess that the Prohibition law has made is that it utterly ignores the conditions upon which rational law making and rational law enforcement depend.”
Enforcement With 2.75 Per Cent Beer
Such is the position of representative wets as to the impossibility, in the face of a hostile publicQUESTION OF ALCOHOLIC CONTENT 321
sentiment which they deem to be overwhelming, of Prohibition enforcement. Their only practical suggestion in behalf of enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment is that of enlarging the statutory content of “non-intoxicating” liquors to include 2.75 per cent beer. Eloquent advocacy of this measure is found in the pamphlet “Better Prohibition Enforcement,” by Lieut. Col. James C. Waddell, formerly a Federal Supervisor of Alcohol and Brewery Control. Mr. Waddell says:
If the non-intoxicating limit were changed from one-half of one per cent to 2.75 per cent, it would aid enforcement in that it would prove helpful in making increased penalties more reasonable and effective in operation. It would remove from the scope of those penalties thousands of persons who are not making or selling intoxicants but who are at present included among the violators of the law. It would help enormously in pointing the law at the real sources of trouble.
Although some may disagree, it is logical to contend that raising the non-intoxicating limit would aid enforcement by decreasing drunkenness. There certainly is no foundation to the argument that beer would incite the alcoholic appetite to stronger drink. If beer were only a stepping stone to hard liquors, ninety per cent of the business in alcoholic beverages, which had gone on for hundreds of years before Prohibition, would not have been in beer. It seems far more logical to contend that the great majority of the322 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
American people, now, as before, would be satisfied with good beer, and that much of tbe present demand for intoxicating liquors would disappear.
Neither side of the Prohibition conflict has viewed the question of 2.75 beer from its correct standpoint, that of enforcement. Because it sounded more like liquor, although decidedly non-intoxicating, the wets originally championed its cause. The drys, seeing it strongly advocated by the wets, suspected them of trying to circumvent the Amendment, and opposed the measure. Without attempting to analyze the present Prohibition situation, it would seem that the future Prohibition conflict would be decidedly one-sided, if the wets could enlist only the friends of those beverages capable of causing intoxication.
If the Federal enforcement machinery could be concentrated upon the sources of supply of hard liquor, and given a better weapon in the way of penalties, it would soon get the results we are looking for. Its present task is too general and diversified.
Drastic Definition of Intoxicant
This view has been adopted by Governor Smith and by virtue of his national leadership is the official wet contribution to suggestions for enforcement. In the stenographic report of his Milwaukee address, Governor Smith said:
It is interesting to look into the police record. Four hundred and three municipalities,DKASTIC VOLSTEAD DEFINITION 323
spread out all over the United States, were taken into consideration and an examination was made of their police records to find out the number of arrests for public intoxication. Eemember, that does not mean drinking at home; that means public intoxication. In 1920, 237,000 people were arrested in these 403 municipalities for public intoxication. In 1926, six years after the advent of Prohibition, that number jumped from 237,000 to 559,000.
Now, getting down to the meat of what is the matter, to my way of thinking, a great deal of this is brought about by the drastic definition contained in the Volstead Act, of what constitutes an intoxicant. There is not any doubt in the minds of the thinking people throughout this State that countless millions of people that have been used all their lives to light wines and beer were driven to hard liquor by that nonsensical, foolish definition of one-half of one per cent as constituting an intoxicant. And as a result of it to-night all over the country, in every State, there is plenty, and plenty of good hard liquor, even in States far removed from the seaboard or in States not contiguous to territory where liquor is manufactured legally and dispensed legally.
Nullification or Repeal Is Sought
The ultimate object in the passage of a measure for 2.75 per cent beer, or for stronger liquors, as freely conceded by the wets, is to break down the324 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Prohibition wall. Thus Fabian Franklin says in “The A B C of Prohibition”:
Although our ultimate goal must be the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, we must endeavor, at a much earlier time than this can be achieved, to get Congress to pass a law which shall really and truly relax the rigors of the Volstead Act. Whether such a law should take the shape of permitting beer and wine—real beer and real wine, no 2.75 per cent make-believe—or should take the shape of a transfer of discretion to the separate States, such as is proposed in the referendum recently passed upon by the people of New York and of Illinois, or such as has long been embodied in the Democratic platforms of the State of Maryland, is a question which I need not particularly discuss.
In either of these ways a great breach would be made in the solid wall of bone-dry Prohibition. That a real measure of relief of this kind would go far towards lessening the immediate evil of the existing situation I feel confident; and this in itself would be a sufficient reason for adopting it. But in my opinion an even more important result of it would be that it would bring repeal of the Amendment into something like hailing distance.
Again, this view is officially ratified by Governor Smith in his speeches which advocate enlargement of the legal alcoholic content of beverages as a measure of “some immediate relief,” to beOVERWHELMING DRY MAJORITY 325
followed by repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, as applied to States that desire its repeal. This, in Governor Smith’s opinion, will result in better enforcement of the Amendment and the Volstead Act in the States that remain dry. Meanwhile, fully expressing his belief that real enforcement is impossible under the law as it stands, Governor Smith promises in his speech of acceptance: “I shall to the very limit execute the pledge of our platform 'to make an honest endeavor to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment and all other provisions of the Federal Constitution and all laws enacted pursuant thereto.’ ”
Dby View
Bishop William T. Manning of New York, who has never been accused of being a fanatical dry, does not despair of a proper enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, and declares his conviction that an overwhelming public sentiment is behind such enforcement. In a sermon delivered in New York October 7, 1928, Bishop Manning said:
First, Prohibition is the law adopted by the overwhelming majority of our people after long consideration and discussion, and, judged by its results on the whole, it is a good law. It is one of the greatest efforts toward moral and social betterment that has ever been attempted, and our action in making336 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
this effort is influencing the thought of the world.
Evils Are Exaggerated
Second, some great and serious evils have resulted from this law, but these evils are often exaggerated by those who oppose the law, and most of these evils are due not to the law itself, but to failure to observe and enforce it. Most of those who oppose and even disobey the law admit that it would be a benefit to our country if it were properly observed. What is now needed is not abandonment of the undertaking when we have only just begun it, but more earnest effort for enforcement of the law and more thorough and impartial investigation of the facts relating to it.
Third, the assertions that this law cannot be enforced come, most of them, from those who do not wish the law to be enforced, and who admit that they hope to see it repealed on the ground that it cannot be enforced. As to the possibility of enforcement, I agree with the statement made a few days ago by Mr. Thomas A. Edison that it can be enforced reasonably well if proper effort is made, and that it is already better enforced than some of our other laws, as, for example, the law against nareotics and the law against holdups. I think Mr. Edison also gave tersely and truly the answer to the contention that this law should be repealed because it is an encroachment upon personal liberty. Mr. Edison said, as reported, “What is civilizationIF LIBERTY RAN WILD
m
anyway but a restraint on personal liberty? If liberty were to run wild we would have no advancement. Civilization becomes better only as we curb liberty in the interest of the general welfare. Of course, we do it in everything.”
Drunks Found No More In Gutter
Fourth, as to the actual working of the law, my work as Bishop takes me into every part of this city and my belief, based on observation and inquiry, is that hampered as enforcement is here, from the fact that we have no State enforcement act, and strong as the sentiment against the law is in this city, the conditions are nevertheless better than they were in the old days before Prohibition was adopted. I see less drunkenness in the streets and public places, and my friends of the Salvation Army, who are in very close and constant contact with these conditions, tell me that in every department of their work they find great improvement as a result of Prohibition. And there is one part of their work that has entirely disappeared, and that is the picking up of drunks out of the gutter. To the plain people, who are the life of our country, I believe this law has already brought great benefit. It has done great things for the women and children in the homes of the wage workers of our land. I support it because of the benefits that it is bringing to the lives and homes of the plain people. .	.	. My belief is that before long
the attitude of violent opposition to this law328 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
will be regarded as an old man’s view and that youth will take its natural place on the side of idealism and progress and of that which is for the greatest good of the greatest number.
Fifth, it may be that in course of time the Volstead law will be in some degree modified. I think that is quite possible, but I doubt if the American people will listen to this until it is proposed by those who are known to be friends of Prohibition instead of by those who are known to be its enemies. When this law is being satisfactorily observed and enforced this will perhaps be considered. At present our people feel, and not without reason, that the proposals for modification usually mean, and are intended to mean, practical nullification.
Cannot Enforce By Making Law Moist
With reference to Bishop Manning’s remark that “eight years is an exceedingly short period for such an undertaking as this,” the organized effort headed by leaders of the type of Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler to have the Amendment at its inception declared unconstitutional indicates that their quarrel is with the law itself and not with its enforcement. As the leading wets admit and proclaim, it is not enforcement but nullification which they seek, either by modifying the law to permit the manufacture and sale of intoxicants, or by measures leading to its totalWOBST LAW IS NOT POSSIBLE
339
repeal. The declaration of the Carnegie Institution of Washington that there is “no longer room for doubt in reference to the toxic action of alcoholic beverages as weak as 2.75 per cent by weight” disposes effectually of any argument for better enforcement by enlarging the permissible alcoholic content of beverages under the law. The courts of the States and of the Federal Government must follow the findings of science in this regard. Hence Governor Smith’s measure of “immediate relief” would be declared invalid, as his 2.75 per cent law in New York was declared invalid.
If Prohibition cannot be enforced by making it moist, can it be enforced under the bone-dry law?
Example of Pennsylvania
An intensive study of the effects of the Volstead Act and its supporting State law in Connecticut, notwithstanding the prevailingly wet sentiment of its people, has been presented in the chapter headed “In a Typically Wet State?” A similar study might have been made of Pennsylvania, where the beneficial effects of enforcement have more than proved its possibility. In his address to the legislature of Pennsylvania on January 4, 1927, Governor Gifford Pinchot said:
In January, 1923, Pennsylvania combined, as did no other State in the Union, the three330 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
great sources of illegal drink—whiskey, alcohol, and beer. More whiskey was stored in the Pittsburgh U. S. Revenue District than in any whole State except Kentucky; scores of crooked alcohol concerns were running in Philadelphia under Federal permit and were diverting into bootleg channels millions of gallons of poison drink each year; and 156 breweries were pouring out illegal high-powered beer all over the State.
The Federal service for enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, with its entire control over the sources of illegal drink, had broken down not only disgracefully but dishonestly. Its principal officials in Pennsylvania, having been selected for their known character, were under indictment for crime. United States District Attorneys, especially in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, had encouraged the big liquor law violators by their inaction and worse, and had dispelled all fear of punishment under Federal law. .	. .
Most important of all, there was no State enforcement law under which to deal with liquor law violators or compel respect for the Constitution of the United States.
With the aid of Major William Burnet Wright, Jr., special counsel in charge of Prohibition, Governor Pinchot reported the following results during his four-year term:
The licensed saloon has been driven from Pennsylvania. The most effective method ever employed against law breaking saloons,CHECK-UP IN PENNSYLVANIA
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breweries, and distilleries bas been adapted to Pennsylvania conditions and finally fought through the Supreme Court and upheld by it. This is the method of padlocking under injunction. ... A recent check-up shows the following results:
For this check-up, thirty-three cities and towns were selected to include the worst parts of the State. In these the locations of 665 saloons which our inspectors had visited and seen openly breaking the law in 1923 were revisited in the autumn of 1926. Four hundred and three of them, or nearly two-thirds, were closed and gone.
To-day the drinking places that still remain are not open saloons but furtive speakeasies, and in nearly every case they are suspicious of strangers and afraid of being caught. Even the speakeasy as a serious problem does not exist in forty-two counties covering more than two-thirds of the area of the State.
. . . Of the 156 breweries that were operating in January, 1923, ninety-five, or nearly two-thirds, are gone. Of the sixty-one still running in the State today, fifty-one are operating under Federal permit. .	. .
In the special session of 1926 the Alcohol Bill was passed. This is the most important enforcement measure yet secured in Pennsylvania. It creates the Alcohol Permit Board, which has the right to permit or not to permit alcohol distilleries to operate, together with the right of complete inspection at any time. It has also the same powers over breweries, as well as the right to the fullest infor-338 PEOHIBITION STILL AT ITS WOEST
mation about the business of each concern. The operations of the Alcohol Board in revoking the permits of law breaking breweries have had the most healthful effect in restraining these sources of illegal drink.
Majority Favors Enforcement
Federal Commissioner Doran’s report of March 29, 1928, of progress in enforcement under a reorganized Prohibition Unit has already been quoted at length. Persons who are ignorant of progress both in the Union and in individual States, may take courage from such reports. For it has already been found that the more the law is enforced the better the majority like it. On the other hand the opponents of the law are inconsistent, using one argument—the personal liberty argument, which appeals to the drinker—and the opposite argument with those who would be glad to see the law enforced, that it does not really interfere very much with personal liberty, that there is more drinking than ever before and Prohibition is a failure. Dr. Butler, one of the exponents of personal liberty, never talks of the personal liberty of the Chinaman to take more “dope,” and seemingly fails to realize that alcohol belongs to the same category of narcotics as opium. As for the spread of enforcement of its prohibition, that is being achieved more rapidly than other historic reforms. Mrs. Elizabeth Til-REFORM WORTH WAITING FOR
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ton; speaking for the National Unitarian Temperance Society before the Senate Subcommittee of the Judiciary in Washington in 1926, said:
As an example, let us take the battle against the slave traffic. It took well nigh 100 years of agitation to get the prohibition of the slave traffic enacted into law, but on the last day of 1807 the slave traffic ended legally in the United States. In 1810, however, President Monroe, in his message, speaks of the illicit traffic which has grown up and calls for stricter enforcement laws. President Madison’s message of 1817 again calls for stricter laws making for better enforcement against the illicit traffic in slaves. In the thirties we read that over 200,000 slaves were annually smuggled across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1871 we have the last act against the slave traffic that appeared in our Congressional Records, according to the testimony of Du Bois. It is evident that had we tested our ability to win out against the slave traffic when the prohibition against it was six years old, we should probably have lost out on the ground that it could never be enforced. But the fact that we had passed the law, blazed the trail by which in the course of two generations we got that law enforced.
Sure Way to Expedite Enforcement
A sure way of expediting the enforcement of National Prohibition, according to William G. McAdoo, is to elect a President known to be its334 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
friend. In his speech at Richmond, Va., February 1, 1928, Mr. McAdoo said:
The supreme need is to put law enforcement in the White House. An attempt is being made to convince the country that, no matter if a wet is elected President, the Constitution and laws will be enforced. This is both unsound and untrue. The White House in the hands of the liquor interests would be a veritable Gibraltar of offensive operations, and the doom of the Eighteenth Amendment would be written boldly upon the face of the Constitution.
The issue is now drawn, and against the utterances of Alfred E. Smith the people will weigh the words of Herbert Hoover in his speech of acceptance at Palo Alto, California, August 11, 1928 :
“I do not favor the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. I stand for the efficient enforcement of the laws enacted thereunder. Whoever is chosen President has under his oath the solemn duty to pursue this course.”CHAPTER XX
CONFESSIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
A capital confession is due the readers of “Prohibition at Its Worst,” which preceded this book. Like every other book on the subject, it was a target for criticism. It was likewise the subject of extravagant praise.
Mr. Evans Clark, who reviewed “Prohibition at Its Worst” for The New York Times, made the just criticism that the book made “no attempt to summarize the arguments which the opponents of Prohibition have marshaled.”
In making amends for this defect we have been singularly rewarded. After presenting in the first part of this book the most representative views on both sides of this bitterly controverted subject, together with the evidence pro and con from authoritative sources, certain conclusions stand fairly revealed.
The first conclusion is that no organized body of opinion, not even the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, as represented by Mr. Pierre S. duPont, Chairman of its Executive Committee, opposes the principle of Private or Employer Prohibition in certain industries.
Employer Prohibition goes on in the midst of
335336 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the controversy over National Prohibition. It was practiced quite generally before National Prohibition by many great manufacturing and transportation industries. This practice was dramatically revealed in the blacklisting, by the United States Brewers’ Association, of E. I. du-Pont de Nemours & Company and of constituent companies of the General Motors Corporation during the war, because they, or their heads, were enforcing abstinence from intoxicating liquors among their employees. Evidence of the brewers ’ blacklist was presented to the Subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary during 1918. The conditions set forth then are justified now by Mr. duPont in behalf of Private Prohibition in the industries of the nation.
“The only bar in the town had been closed by the duPonts,” said Camillus Kessler in his confidential report to Hugh F. Fox, Secretary of the United States Brewers’ Association, after his visit to Penn’s Grove in Delaware. “If a workman comes to work,” Kessler added, “with the slightest indication of liquor on his breath he is not allowed to work. From all that I could see, Prohibition could not be more effectively enforced than it is in Penn’s Grove. I was informed by the officials and by men who had worked in the other factories of the company that the same conditions exist in all of the duPont Company factories.”PROHIBITION BY AN EMPLOYER
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In our first chapter, after Ms attention had been drawn to this testimony, Mr. duPont has replied to our query concerning his attitude toward Employer Prohibition.
“I believe there is some confusion,” he says, “in regard to Prohibition by law and Prohibition by an employer. If certain work involving danger to life and property requires absolute sobriety, I cannot find fault with the employer refusing to employ a man who shows any sign of contact with alcohol when he reports for work, and, in fact, where the employer may be held liable for the action of the man employed, he may, if he choose, properly decline to employ a man who uses intoxicants at any time.”
This illuminates the issue. In recent years employers’ liability laws have been placed on the statute books of most of the States of the Union. The situation has brought about a more absolute form of Prohibition, privately enforced, than that embodied in the Eighteenth Amendment or the Volstead act. Yet no voice save that of the licensed liquor traffic has been raised in protest against it. Private Prohibition restricts the personal liberty to drink of countless thousands. The champions of personal liberty on the side of wetness and defiance of Public Prohibition—Governor Alfred E. Smith, John J. Raskob, Clarence Darrow, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Mr. duPont —face the practice of Private Prohibition, en-338 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
forced under penalty of loss of livelihood, with explicit or silent assent.
That the brewers did protest, systematically and by methods that were fair and fonl, is manifest from the record of the Senate hearings of 1918. Along with the Kessler report on duPont Prohibition in the duPont works, there was submitted at those hearings evidence that the brewers had blacklisted some fifty corporations. In the “List of Firms Who Are Unfriendly to Our Interests,” taken from the files of the United States Brewers’ Association, stand the names of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the United States Steel Corporation, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Goodrich and Goodyear Rubber Companies, the Carnegie Steel Company, the Pittsburgh Steel and Coal Companies, the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company, and individual firms like that of John Wanamaker, who defied the brewers to do their worst. Many heads of these and other companies who to-day oppose the wet program of Governor Smith and his candidacy are reluctant to go back to any form of licensing the liquor traffic, which boycotted them during the great war.
Even Mr. Owen D. Young, Chairman of the General Electric Company, while he supports Smith for President, is careful to say, “I am not supporting Governor Smith because of his position on Prohibition,” and “I would like to see theSEASONS FOR PUBLIC PROHIBITION 339
hypocrisy which now exists in our legislatures and our homes wiped out, but I want to be very patient with this effort of a great democracy in self-discipline.”
Mr. Young’s stand on Public Prohibition is very close to that of Mr. Hoover, who, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Presidency, said:	“Common sense compels
us to realize that grave abuses have occurred— abuses which must be remedied.” Mr. Hoover nevertheless makes plain his faith in Prohibition with the pronouncement, “Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. It must be worked out constructively.”
Our second conclusion is that the overwhelming weight of scientific, administrative, and popular opinion is on the side of public as well as private Prohibition of the liquor traffic. This public support is accorded for reasons identical with those urged by employers for Private Prohibition, including Mr. duPont.
Henry Ford sums up the reasons for Public Prohibition when he says that “everything in the United States is keyed up to a new pace;” that the “speed with which we operate our motor cars, and with which we operate our intricate machinery” makes life “impossible with liquor.”
The reasons for Government Prohibition are summed up administratively by Robbins Stoeckel,340 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
Commissioner of Motor Vehicles of Connecticut, when he says that the driver who is quite drunk is usually not dangerous because he is so easily detected or incapacitated, but that the “really dangerous driver is the man who has had one or two drinks only, who still thinks he is in possession of his faculties but whose driving judgment has been impaired.” A moderate drink, a slight swerve in the wrong direction, colliding with any one of the twenty-three million motor vehicles that crowd the nation’s highways, may result fatally.
If the Pennsylvania Railroad can arrogate to itself the right to forbid its locomotive engineers to drink a drop even when off duty, may not the American people, through its legally authorized representatives, forbid all automobile drivers to do the same? He who drives a locomotive 60 miles an hour has a steel track to steer his course for him, and the train he passes has another. But he who drives an automobile 60 miles an hour has to steer his own course for himself, on a common highway, and every car he passes is at his mercy. Moreover, each cross road he comes to is a grade crossing. Every engineer is a trained professional; but most automobile drivers are amateurs. If private prohibition applied to the professional on a protected track is justified, surely governmental prohibition, ap-INFLEXIBLE VERDICT OF SCIENCE 341
plied to the amateur on an unprotected track, is more than justified. But, prohibition applied to the driver means to-day in America, prohibition applied to everybody. So the automobile argument for prohibition is conclusive, even if there were no other.
The reasons justifying Public Prohibition in the interest of public safety are summed up scientifically, after exhaustive researches by Miles and Dodge in the Nutrition Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, by their Director, Dr. Francis Gr. Benedict, when he says that after very moderate doses of alcohol, practically all individuals are affected with general depression of nerves and muscles, lessened sharpness of vision, and lessened eye-hand motor co-ordination. Dr. Benedict declares that “the driver of an automobile in the traffic of a modern American city has no business to undertake his task after drinking even these so-called ‘permissible amounts’ of alcohol.” Again, he says: “Clearly, dilution, even to 2.75 per cent, cannot solve the alcohol problem, nor can it alter our estimate of the effect of alcohol upon human efficiency.” Yet again: “Inflexible science says: ‘Moderate user, keep off! For at least four hours after a dose of alcohol formerly considered “permissible,” you, as a motor vehicle operator, may well be considered a “menace to society.” ’ ”
This American verdict tallies closely with that342 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
of the eminent members of the Medical Research Council of the British Central Control Board on the Liquor Traffic, who point to the depression by alcohol in “any doses in which it affects them at all, of mental processes, if they involve in any degree the higher mental faculties.” The' still all-too-prevalent doctrine that alcohol is a stimulant or can ever be other than a depressant and paralyzer, is not countenanced by modern scientific findings.
It is largely because of the growing popular realization that science and the arts have not only set a pace for civilization that neither the habitual nor the “moderate” drinker of intoxicants can follow with safety to himself or to his fellows, but that they have also provided efficient substitutes for the saloon in the motor car, the radio, the motion pictures, and the absorbing pursuits of industry as revolutionized by modern methods, that the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and kindred organizations have been unable to muster more than a corporal’s guard of votes in either house of Congress since the advent of National Prohibition.
This statement is backed by what, to us, is a conclusive array of facts, presented in the Introduction and the first and fourteenth chapters of this book.
A third main conclusion, revealed in the working of the dispensary system in Canada, is that,LATEST NEWS FROM CANADA
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as in the case of the South Carolina experiment that preceded it, political ownership and operation of the liquor traffic serves to increase the consumption of alcohol and fails to check bootleg-gery. As this hook goes to press the Toronto Daily Star, the largest and most influential paper in Ontario, in its issue of September 29, 1928, displays the headlines: “Ontario Liquor Bill May Be $50,000,000; Consumption Crows—Cost Based on 3,000,000 Population Estimated at $17 Per Capita—Permit Sales Are Up—Monteith Expects Net Profit of $8,000,000 from Business This Year.” This refers to the estimate of Hon. J. D. Monteith, Provincial Treasurer of Ontario. In the Montreal News of the same date appears an article on “Bootlegging in Montreal,” in which it is stated that the situation has become /“so serious that the Provincial and Municipal authorities have declared drastic measures will have to be adopted,” and that bootlegging “bids fair to eclipse the legal sale of alcoholic beverages.” “It is a well known fact that these blind pigs are to be found all over the city,” The' News reports, “many of them running day and night for the accommodation of those who find they want a drink and want it quickly.” The value of brewery and distillery stocks in Canada has risen, in the case of the four largest concerns, to more than treble their value before the adoption of the liquor dispensaries, notwithstanding that 50 per cent of344 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the population in the dispensary provinces is dry by local option and two of the nine provinces are still under Prohibition.
A fourth conclusion is that while liquor consumption in Canada has been increasing under the dispensary system, it has diminished in the United States under Prohibition. This conclusion is warranted by the lower rates of mortality from alcoholism and diseases allied with drunkenness as compared with the pre-Prohibition rates. It is justified by the reports of Prohibition Commissioner Doran and Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt as to the checking of the diversion of industrial alcohol into illegal channels and the more effective measures against smuggling. It is further justified by the enormously increased prices of bootleg liquors as compared with standard pre-Prohibition prices of alcoholic beverages—a sure index of their present scarcity. It is confirmed by reports of the Department of Commerce showing the birth and rapid growth of the export trade in American grapes during Federal Prohibition, and the dwindling of the hop-growing industry.
The high price of bootleg liquors alone places them, for more than sporadic use, beyond the purse of the average family among ninety million people of the United States, whose income available for anything above the most obvious comforts and necessities can hardly exceed, as con-CRITICISMS OF FORMER BOOK
346
servatively estimated, $117 a year per standard group of five.
The figures on arrests for drunkenness, if they were as reliable as those adduced under other heads, would have place here as showing reduced consumption of alcohol in the United States during National Prohibition. By using the uncertain bases accepted by the Moderation League and adding the best information available, it is found that the curve of arrests has found a level far below the pre-Prohibition level.
Here it is necessary to advert again to the criticisms of “ Prohibition at Its Worst.” Much of the criticism has been fair and much of it unfair. The most unfair has been that accusing the author of intentional unfairness. One critic complained that the author put in fine print in footnotes the explanation of the charts for drunkenness, alleging that this was a cunning attempt to hide the weakness of the estimates. Another, going still further, alleges that in the suggestions to readers the statement, “Those wishing merely to skim this book may read the charts only. They are self-explanatory even without the supplementary reading matter below each,” was a deliberate attempt to divert the reader from realizing how unreliable the figures are!
In the chapter on the attitude of physicians toward Prohibition a fault of the earlier book is corrected. It omitted the second pronouncement346 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
of the American Medical Association concerning its avoidance of a vote on the medicinal value of alcohol. The bulk of the material for the first book was several years old, and was given to an assistant separately from the later notes, to be co-ordinated. In some way the second resolution was shuffled out, perhaps because it was mistaken for a duplicate of the first. As a consequence the book was accused of intentionally misrepresenting the attitude of the American Medical Association.
Probably no human being is totally devoid of prejudice. Moreover, disclaiming prejudice is likely to be regarded as evidence of it. But the author of “Prohibition at Its Worst” has tried to put into his writings the ideals which he has always held of open-mindedness and willingness to adjust one’s beliefs to evidence as fast as it accumulates. As Huxley said, “The scientific man should be a fanatic only on one subject, the truth.”
Accordingly, in successive editions of “Prohibition at Its Worst,” modifications have been made which further evidence and criticism seemed to require and as fast as typographical limitations permitted.
In the first edition the same estimate of the strictness of enforcement was used for all the various cities. This was found to be misleading; if any estimate is to be used, it should be appliedQUESTION OP POLICE STRICTNESS 347
merely to the country as a whole. All the diagrams on drunkenness were consequently changed, omitting any estimate of strictness except for the 626 cities given on page 43, where the chart used Mr. Corradini’s estimates that, roughly, 40 per cent of the actual cases of intoxication were arrested in 1920 and previously, and 90 per cent in 1923 and thereafter.
In this book, the chapter on the alleged increase in drunkenness contains a further revision. It adopts an estimate of 55 per cent instead of 40 per cent as the more probable figure to express the arrests for actual drunkenness up to 1917, and 70 per cent for 1924 and thereafter. These figures, like the former, are very rough and round, but accord with the best opinion available, being based on the returns from a, questionnaire sent to chiefs of police of American cities. According to these estimates the minimum drunkenness occurred in 1920, and thereafter the figure rose to 1926; since that time it has been slightly less. The figures for arrests have remained virtually constant beginning with 1923.
It should be added, however, as was stated in “Prohibition at Its Worst,” but perhaps with insufficient emphasis, that no figures for arrests for drunkenness are thoroughly reliable. The large amount of space devoted to them in that book was not because of any great faith in the results. On the contrary the object was to show how unre-348 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
liable they are especially as used by the Moderation League. There are various reasons for the unreliability of drunkenness statistics. It is undoubtedly true that in many cities there has been a tendency to conceal the amount of drunkenness by changing the record from Drunkenness to Disorderly Conduct, or to have no police record by sending the “drunk” to the hospital for treatment. The latter expedient, apparently, has been largely adopted in New York City. Such inaccuracies in the records of drunkenness doubtless explain in considerable measure the differences in the figures for various cities and the differences in their trends.
At this point it may be well to reply to criticisms of the type developed in the pamphlet entitled “Professor Fisher Befuted,” by Mr. E. Clemens Horst, of San Francisco. Professor Henry W. Farnam of Yale University, to whom Mr. Horst sent a copy, made an extended answer from which we quote the following:
In the main part of your paper, which you evidently consider important enough to summarize in your foreword, you do not question Professor Fisher’s figures regarding such things as arrests for intoxication, death rates from alcoholism, etc., but put a different interpretation upon them by only taking a part of the facts, whereas Professor Fisher has given them all. In other words, you takeA MISUSE OF STATISTICS
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as your starting point, not a normal year, but the year 1919, after the pressure of war, the enrollment of some four million young men in the army, the patriotic spirit of sacrifice, and war-time restrictions on alcohol, including war-time Prohibition, had reduced drinking and its consequences to an abnormally low point. You then compute the increase in the evils of drink, which have taken place since that very low level, and charge them to Prohibition, completely disregarding the improvement which has taken place as compared with normal years before the war. That this is a misuse of statistics is obvious to any economist.
Similarly, Professor Thomas Nixon Carver of Harvard University has written to Mr. Horst, in part, as follows:
Pre-war figures are high, or, in the form of a curve, the curve is high on the chart. During the war, that is, under partial Prohibition and severe regulation, also under the moral fervor of the war, the figures fell rapidly, reaching their lowest point along about 1919, after which they began to rise, but have not yet risen, outside of New York and Maryland, to the pre-war level. There may be some connection between the two wet Governors and these figures. However, that is not the point. Throughout the country in general, while there has been a great increase over 1919 and 1920, they have not yet reached the pre-war level.”350 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
The letterhead of Mr. Horst in 1925 bore the legend, “The largest hop grower in the world.” While his business suffered because of Prohibition, Mr. Horst asserts, and is doubtless sincere in so doing, that his opposition to the Prohibition Amendment is quite disinterested. We content ourselves with pointing out that the error into which he fell is a common one in the wet arguments, and that Governor Smith repeated it in his Milwaukee speech of September 29, 1928, in his comparisons of arrests for drunkenness in the United States between 1920 and 1927, without referring to the higher level of arrests per 10,000 population during the pre-Prohibition era.
Messrs. Clarence Darrow and Victor S. Yarros, in their book, “The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others,” have repeated the same error in reproducing the defense by Professor Walter F. Willcox of statements on arrests for drunkenness put forth by the Moderation League of New York. In this Professor Will-cox countenances the indefensible method of comparing conditions today, not with conditions before Prohibition, but with conditions when Prohibition was a new broom, and in some ways swept cleaner than today. Nor does Professor Willcox nor do Messrs. Darrow and Yarros even mention, much less defend, the main criticism made of the Moderation League, its failure to take account of increase of population and other more technicalPROPERTY OP THE BREWERS
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failures. Nor do they defend the indefensible inclusion of the Chicago statistics which are not for drunkenness, but include disorderly conduct, nor yet the indefensible statement that Indiana, padded by the discredited figures for Indianapolis, is a fair sample of the dry States.
Instead, Messrs. Darrow and Yarros display a tender regard for the property of the brewers. They accuse the author of “Prohibition at Its Worst” of wishing to “destroy property running into the hundreds of millions of dollars without the batting of an eye or without the formality of a notice.”
It might he idle to point out to these defenders of the property of the brewers that not once, hut on several occasions the United States Supreme Court had informed them that they were continually on notice that they were entitled to no compensation for business and property destroyed by reason of Prohibition. The conduct of the liquor business has been held undeviatingly in a long line of decisions, both of the Federal Supreme Court and of State courts, to have been a privilege and not a right, and subject to forfeiture at any time according to the decisions of public policy. Their licenses to do business have always implied the risk of such forfeiture. As for the main body of the criticisms of Messrs. Darrow and Yarros, they rest mainly on the assumptions that paralysis by alcohol is the best modem means by which352 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
the masses may find relief from an otherwise wretched existence, and that the sleep of narcotism is identical in its effect with natural sleep, as well as with the process of focussing the attention. This curious doctrine of the school of Hugo Muensterberg and Charles L. Dana is analyzed at length in the Introduction. It departs widely from the prevailing scientific opinion as to the essential harmfulness of intoxicants, in quantities far short of what used to he deemed permissible.
But a juster criticism of “Prohibition at Its Worst” is embodied in the ably informing book, “Prohibition: Its Economic and Industrial Aspects,” by Professor Herman Feldman. Mr. Pierre S. duPont joins Mr. Feldman in the objection to laboratory tests as a basis for determining, with any degree of mathematical accuracy, the gains in dollars brought by National Prohibition. It is true that in a vast number, probably a majority, of the laboratory experiments alcohol was administered to the subject not while at work, but at definite longer or shorter periods before beginning work. Many of the experiments could and did “indicate the effect on efficiency of a glass of beer taken with a noonday meal”; also, without meals and at differing periods after meals. Totterman tested needlethreading eleven hours before doing the work the next morning, and some early work reported fromCASE FOE ECONOMIC GAINS 353
the Kraepelin laboratory was done eight to ten hours after taking the dose of alcohol.
The protocols of experiments like those of the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory not only “could” but did show “the varying effects” of alcohol “on different individuals” of “differing ages,” and so on. When a great variety of experiments done under differing conditions with different individuals and nationalities tend to show similar results, it is manifest that the truth is being approximated. Those results, as recorded in “Prohibition at Its Worst,” are found not to conflict with the common observation of losses in efficiency of moderate drinkers while at work. Laboratory subjects are not always total abstainers, and second doses are sometimes given to observe the cumulative effect.
But it is true that, in actual life, the drink of liquor is often taken on top of the left-over effects of previous doses, and without regard to quantities, meals, or physical condition of the drinker. These conditions, in the nature of things, the carefully controlled conditions of the laboratory cannot fully duplicate.
For this reason we prefer to rest our case for the economic gains of Prohibition only partly on the results of laboratory tests of efficiency, and more generally on the universal testimony of employers. The “factors of safety” used in building up the estimate of $3,000,000,000 annually354 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
gained through increased efficiency should protect that estimate as a reasonably safe minimum, and to this should be added $3,000,000,000 more gained by the simple transfer to productive industries of money that would otherwise go into the production of beverage alcohol, making a total which, under any reasonable survey and assessment of all the facts available, can scarcely, by any possibility, be less than six billions a year and may well be much more.
Many other criticisms of “Prohibition Still at Its Worst” betray the fact that the average man does not even know how little he knows on the subject. He is generally sure (1) that alcohol is a stimulant; (2) that beer and even light wines are healthful rather than otherwise; (3) that his “thirst” for these is a natural one, and (4) that most people can use them in moderation without danger of using them “in excess”—every one of which four notions is false and in this book has been so shown.
But a fifth and main conclusion of this study can be readily understood and appreciated by everybody. It is that the saloon and the cult of drink have been supplanted by the principle of specialization in industry and in modern life.
When Hugo Muensterberg and Dr. Charles L. Dana confused the paralytic «»focussing of the attention produced by ethyl alcohol with the healthful relaxation produced by an act of focus-PRINCIPLE OF SPECIALIZATION
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sing the attention, they unwittingly laid bare a principle which the American people, perhaps as much as any other nation, have applied in their daily pursuits.
It is the principle on which our large-scale industries are run. It is the principle which places men in charge of special departments in our stores. It is the principle of the chain store and of standardization. It is the principle whereby the professions and the arts have been split into specialties. It is the principle that Henry Ford has applied with his single-operation machines and his single-operation men.
In every activity of our national life this principle of focussing the attention upon single things to the exclusion of all other things has delivered its practitioners of care. Every constituent company of the General Motors Corporation is left free to specialize on its own particular type of car, without the worries that would beset a company which tried to produce many types. The Corporation itself specializes, acting merely as a co-ordinating agency, and delegating to its several companies the solution of sets of problems peculiar to each. Every set of problems is in turn split and departmentalized within each constituent company, so that its chief executive may center his attention on his administrative duties and each head of a department may be free to develop solely its function in the organism of the356 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
company. The late H. L. Gantt, one of the apostles of scientific management according to this principle, used to say that a test of correct operation in a factory would be the facility with which its executive might sample it and he free of work and worry. Half an hour spent in the examination of key-charts, kept up to the minute and showing that the different departments were proceeding according to schedule, would leave him free to spend the balance of the day on the golf links.
This universal process of deliverance from care, extending from the highest executive to the least foreman and his subordinates in the daily pursuits of the people, has resulted in shortening the American workday from sixteen hours to fourteen and twelve, and from twelve to ten, and from ten to eight, leaving half of the waking day for personal and family concerns. With it has come deliverance from the longing for oblivion, in drink, from the distresses and inco-ordinations of an existence of wretched toil. In this age “misery drinking” has been supplanted, for the majority of our people, by leisure, higher education, interest in developing new industries such as aviation, the motor car and electrical industries, and the focussings of leisure that have sprung from them—the radio, the moving picture and the new means of adventurous relaxation on the highways and in the air.
What, then, is the situation today? We mayWORST PERIOD NOT YET CLOSED 357
end as we began in “Prohibition at Its Worst.” Prohibition is admittedly not yet out of its worst period. But it symbolizes the freeing of a nation from the toilsome drudgeries of its ancestors and from their drowning of their sorrows in drink. Even in the opinion of the wets, the saloon is banished forever. The period of the trial of Federal Prohibition by the civil service has begun. The people, attracted by the healthful diversions of a life of ordered industry and growing leisure, have thus far by their votes fully ratified the beliefs in which a searching and impartial study has confirmed us, as follows:
(1)	Present conditions of law enforcement under National Prohibition are intolerable and must be corrected.
(2)	Even so, they are not so dark as they have been painted. Moreover, if we do ultimately correct them, they are now in the nature of temporary evils, destined to fade away in a few years, while the good from Prohibition will go on indefinitely. Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton does well in calling attention to the length of time taken for the effectual prohibition of the African slave trade—from 1807, when it was legally abolished, to 1871, when the last act was passed to enforce the law. William Allen White points to the generation needed for making prohibition of the liquor traffic effective in Kansas. A period of eight years for the nation is short indeed, and, in view of the material358 PROHIBITION STILL AT ITS WORST
and spiritual gains attainable, thrice that number of years spent in more effective enforcement and public education would be well rewarded.
(3)	Prohibition has already accomplished incalculable good, hygienieally, economically, and socially.
(4)	Real personal liberty, the liberty to live and enjoy the full use of our faculties, is increased by Prohibition.
(5)	Light wines and beer cannot be legalized without another Constitutional Amendment.
(6)	No such Amendment can be passed.
(7)	All that the wets can possibly accomplish is laxity of enforcement, or nullification; in other words, enormously to increase the very disrespect for law which they profess to deplore.
(8)	Therefore, the only satisfactory solution lies in fuller enforcement.