A Declaration of Intent
Williams, Michael
A DECLARATION OF INTENT THE statements addressed by modificationists to the House Judiciary Committee in its hearings on prohibition cannot be dismissed as a recital of grievances. They make up the...
...It was no longer a social reform principally...
...No one of them has a personal stake in the modification or repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...Even wets who have been saying much the same things over and over again must have been startled at the impact of these combined statements...
...To assume that the average citizen has more money in his pocket because of prohibition is to assume that drinking has been stopped...
...They make up the weightiest offensive ever launched against prohibition...
...The hearings were impressive in another way, not only because of the prominence of the witnesses, but because of the range of interests which they represented...
...None are more determined to resist, or more successful in avoiding prohibition than those who were too young both to vote and to drink in 1918...
...In ten years we have seen the rise of the generation which was to have been first heir to the estate of prohibition, and it has not fallen on its knees in thanksgiving...
...to class with the bootleggers and racketeers who were passionately devoted to it all citizens who were its critics...
...the development of a bootlegging industry, involving an alliance between agents of the law and "the most recklessly criminal section of the population...
...Even if there were, as Father John A. Ryan did not hesitate to point out, the principle of sacrificing personal control for wealth is hardly an admirable one...
...Or, where that title was not expedient, it was both an economic and a social experiment...
...Certainly the drys have managed to win very numerous recruits by claiming the prosperity of the last decade as the natural effect of prohibition, neglecting all the accidental circumstances which projected us as the dominant financial power of the world: the war, the concentration of European attention upon problems of reconstruction, the rise of the automobile and steel industries-things which had their roots well down into the years preceding the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...To say that workmen are more efficient under the Volstead Act is to pay a compliment to the virtues of home brew and dago red...
...the temptations to official corruption, and the revolt of youth...
...Experiments in the legislative rule of life appeal to them about as much as experiments in suicide...
...As to the ineffectiveness and injustice of prohibition, we have had testimony before this from every sphere of American activity...
...These men are not professional agitators...
...Here were the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a banker, a professor of sociology, the driest chief of police Chicago has ever had, the head of the Cook County Psychopathic Hospital, three attorneys, and many others...
...they have no course but "to petition in public and in principle to get it repealed...
...In their "conscience and judgment" this law "invades personal liberty...
...but it remained for the recent hearings to demonstrate how representative of all our interests that testimony is...
...Directly or indirectly, they are not on the payrolls of a political organization...
...And so the definitions of prohibition were changed...
...Is it not possible that in these hearings we have seen the countless but scattered expressions of dissatisfaction united and clarified in a declaration of intent...
...an attack, not merely on the principles underlying it, but on those which have been developed to preserve it during the last ten years...
...To overlook these circumstances made a false argument, but a persuasive slogan...
...And the most effective way of defending it was to thunder "traitor" at all who opposed it...
...They seek it because they are tired of the hypocrisy of prohibition...
...it was an industrial pick-me-up...
...But prohibition has failed to prohibit, and as General Atterbury said, it has failed because of developments unforeseen in 1918: the widespread cultivation of an art of home brewing...
...Robert K. K. Cassatt, Philadelphia banker, told the Committee that neither he nor any of his acquaintances see any connection between industrial progress and prohibition...
...They have never accepted the experiment and they never will...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 19
