Correspondence
nunciations of saloons, despite the opprobrium and physical abuse they brought him from the local rowdies, were apparently well received by Denver's temperance league. In 1862 President Lincoln...
...E1...
...Professor Cranston says that "at the very top the bureaucrat has no tenure...
...So let him drink white wine...
...Next came national brewers and distillers-Big Business...
...In actual fact, men like Cali fano and Young are, like the President, trying to keep the government over which they preside from being run for and in the interests of the bureaucracy...
...The original saloonkeeper was a hale and hearty fellow, a man seeking wealth and good standing in the community, a man not necessarily scrupulously honest but at least possessing notions of fair play and charity...
...Asahina warns that moralism in politics is as "opprobrious" on the New Right as it is on'the Left (as if there is any subject of political debate that is not moral...
...Is there not more that can be said about a man who has been running for the presidency since 1968...
...The Bureau Chief has tenureand power...
...Missionary pastors in the Colorado territory were few during the middle 1800s...
...In 1862 President Lincoln appointed John Evans to be the territorial governor...
...He states that the "social agenda" of the New Right, including abortion, is a matter for "symbolic" rather than "practical" politics...
...Colorado was the second state to enfranchise women...
...The American Spectator helps me maintain a vestige of sanity...
...Walter Hickel, the illfated Secretary of the Interior under President Nixon, once made the mistake of trying to transfer a bureau chief to another position...
...Robert M. Parke Coral Gables, Florida Professor Maurice Cranston's brilliant article ("Whatever Happened to Liberalism...
...Robert Asahina's comments in the symposium feature of your Fifteenth Anniversary issue were truly amazing...
...It will take decades to recover from some of them...
...The outcry against the crass excesses of Denver's saloons reflected the sense of the country...
...The number of saloons did increase, and even more dramatically than Noel suggests: in 1860 there was one saloon for each 1,150 permanent residents and transients...
...Christian witness initially took a small role in shaping Denver's development...
...Women, who had been discouraged from patronizing saloons, were especially staunch supporters of legally enforced abstinence, prohibition...
...Where the saloons had once been havens, they now were businesses...
...Was he paid for them...
...Back East, churches had been more intent upon internal revival, and the growing trend was to send missionaries to China...
...In time these men lost out to other, ruthless men interested primarily in easy profits and political clout...
...When churches began to be established in Denver, many were ethnic Lutheran which catered only to German- and Norwegian-speaking settlers...
...The real saloons had been gone for years, anyway...
...In terms of Washington bureaucracy, the top bureaucrat is the Bureau Chief, the untouchable, often because of his lateral connections with congressmen and their committees...
...The campus of Brooklyn College is a wasteland of "Third World" studies and radical feminist dykes...
...If that were all that they became, perhaps the saloons could have been tolerated, even if contemptuously, by the better folk of Denver...
...has one flaw, minor of course, yet one which needs comment...
...Territorial, state, and federal governments wanted their cuts, too...
...He learned quickly what a mistake he had made and canceled the transfer...
...President Kennedy was once heard to say, in response to whether or not he liked a given legislative proposal, "I like it but I'm not sure the government would...
...Is this the liberal's fault...
...The golden age of saloonery strangled in the grip of dat ole debbil Big Government...
...Denver's city hall learned that tax assessments against saloons, unlike cowboys, were readily enforceable...
...Reagan has performed this task gracefully and amusingly...
...If, in Asahina's opinion, fighting the abortion fight makes conservatives look like "reactionaries," then tough...
...The liberals have tried for the most part to be decent...
...Each supplier sought to move huge volumes of his own product while restraining the sales of competitors' brands...
...It is not, I suspect, for the reasons he states, but rather because abortion has been- and is going to be a nasty fight...
...After all, it makes liberals look like monsters...
...Asahina's "mental test" left me gaping-if the conservative agenda on abortion could be implemented, but only at the cost of more government regulation or cutbacks in defense spending, would it be "worth it...
...By default the inner-city saloons became hangouts for the poor and the shiftless...
...To stay open, a saloon required a crafty operator, one capable of making the most of the system such as he found it...
...Furthermore, the 460 contained a significantly greater proportion of (nondrinking) women and children than did the earlier 1,150...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 26) Wade necessitate more government or less defense...
...Since when does returning to the -Jason Maoz status quo ante 1973 and Roe v. Brooklyn, New York (continued on page 36) 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983 fashioned no moving legend from the varied and unusual life of their hero...
...Sales subordinated entertainment, which grew increasingly cheap and tawdry...
...Evans was a temperate Methodist who had founded Evanston, Illinois, the home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union...
...in 1900 Denver had about one per 460...
...Yet he remains debonair, sparing us the morbidity so characteristic of our ideologues...
...Consider the December 13 Time magazine cover story...
...Although it's not yet as bad as the larger schools, the professorial lunatics are hard at work...
...By the close of the century it covered the nation and had become synonymous with abstinence...
...The number of churches jumped to 149 from two...
...Denver neither needed them nor wanted them anymore...
...But the mission, the nature of the saloon, changed also...
...Their vitality was spent...
...He came from one of America's most glamorous settings, Hollywood-and from a legendary Hollywood era at that, the time of Capra films, of Cooper and Stewart and Wayne...
...When the 1800s began, a temperance movement was building in the eastern states...
...He didn't deserve saloons...
...The elimination of an entire generation of American children is not, as Asahina suggests, the inevitable outcome of "social change," but rather the result of a specific decision written by a specific justice on a specific set of facts...
...He has lost more often than Senator Kennedy...
...He had become respectable...
...Then why has Asahina selected out abortion for the President to put on the back burner...
...by the turn of the century, she was married...
...Noel mentions these men in passing but neglects substantive discussion of the early popular support they enjoyed...
...So are a lot of the issues Asahina would assign to the realm of "practical" politics...
...I must demur...
...Reagan is at ease with the world...
...One of Reagan's crises was a bullet to the chest...
...Asahina should be ashamed to urge such a cowardly course on our President...
...He is patronized, though he is not stoned...
...Best wishes for your continued success...
...Yet the book shelves do not fill with his biographies...
...Civic involvement degenerated into machine politics...
...Practically alone, Ronald Reagan has raised the conservative critique of government to a Congress, a Washington bureaucracy, and a news media that theretofore had furtively ignored it...
...The American Spectator has been a refuge for me in this city of welfare patrons and high society liberals...
...Over half of the men held white-collar, jobs, and many livedd in saloonless suburbs, sipping cocktails in the parlor before dinner...
...However, men like Califano and Young exemplify the truth of a famous axiom by Vice President Charles Dawes-"A President's natural enemies are the members of his Cabinet...
...The combined effect of big government and big business meant higher costs, tighter competition, and _ much smaller profits...
...As the decades passed, the population changed: more people, more women, more families, more churches...
...The state voted to go dry on January 1, 1916, four years before the nation did so as a whole...
...Admittedly abortion is a moral issue...
...He has for nearly 30 years represented a position of the underdog in American intellectual life, namely: the position of the intellectual conservative...
...No longer did the average Denverite feel natural bellied up to the bar...
...Bartenders scrambled to catch and hold the thirstiest, least discriminating customers...
...Think of what the liberals would make of such an adventure were he theirs...
...The references to school busing, affirmative action, women's lib, gay rights, point out that the social scientists in the Democratic party have spawned and developed some highly counterproductive schemes...
...Regular readers of this journal will sense instinctively what brought this to pass...
...He is profoundly principled, but somehow detached from the squirrelly urgency that has brought so many of our recent Messiahs to ruin...
...In 1860 the average Denverite was a young man passing through...
...Why the silence from the conservatives...
...God's Frozen Chosen generally did not provide moral leadership beyond their congregational boundaries...
...Why no romantic tears and stiff upper lips...
...I am referring to his discussion of Andrew Young and Joseph Califano, dismissed by President Carter...
...Nobody better demonstrated the truth of that finding than Andrew Young during his term as U.S...
...In their quests for market domination, they focused on the retail level...
...He responded with grace and a series of hilarious lines...
...I mostly liked what I read and am pleased with my discovery...
...And the business of saloons was booze, period...
...Arising from spiritual beliefs, the crusade drew substantial support from religious legalists, industrialists seeking greater productivity from labor, and political reformers...
...Ambassador to the United Nations...
...To begin with he remains refreshingly apart from the futile freneticism, the exaggerated drive, the bombastic commitment, all the empty agitation and ambiguous oratory that characterizes American government...
...Arnold Beichman Visiting Scholar Hoover Institution Stanford, California Heartiest congratulations on your fifteenth anniversary-and fond wishes for continued success in the future...
...Top bureaucrats in Washington do hold tenure and they do not serve, as do Cabinet members, at the pleasure of the Chief Executive...
...As Washington figures go Ronald Reagan is an interesting man...
...Roe v. Wade was a "practical political act by a runaway judiciary, and the only recourse for conservatives who wish to stop the horror lies in practical politics...
...After this the liberals take over, and their hackneyed observations are not all that dulcet...
...There are only a few hackneyed observations: his geniality, his niceness...
...While head of the actors' union he faced real danger, requiring him to carry a gun...
...Christine Moruza Berkeley, California "You might say we have become a nation of the legless-hordes of people of all ages daily put on special costumes and special shoes, risking permanent damage to spine, knees, 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...Not even Andrew Jackson matched those heroics...
...So is national defense...
...Also, intensive regulation by the municipal authorities created grand opportunities-quickly exploited-for graft...
...Oh, well...
...Their strategies were to intimidate and control saloon operators and to promote the opening of new saloons...
...El C O R R E S P O N D E N C E : Fifteenth Anniversary Celebrations I have received my first issue, which happens to be the Fifteenth Anniversary issue (December 1982...
...As a consequence, America's frontier was overlooked...
...What Robert J. Donovan says of Harry Truman in Donovan's new Truman biography can also be said of Reagan: he is "a buoyant, good-natured, secure individual with a sense of well-being that had carried him through the storms and crises...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
