Communications
MULLANEY, BERNARD J. & KELLER, J. B. & ROOD, MARY & MARTINDALE, REV. C. C.
COMMUNICATIONS (We regret that, for the time being, we are compelled by lack of space not to publish much interesting correspondence which has reached us. Preference is given no one, our method of...
...In Elmer Murphy's article on Money, Morals and Health, in the issue of February 12, even assuming that Mr...
...for county option chiefly, and at most state-wide option, the very thing wets now clamor for...
...publicity for substitute proposals to control the liquor traffic...
...And I believe it can be shown that the concept of morality from which such legislation springs is not merely non-Catholic but is in essence anti-Catholic...
...I take it that Mr...
...We have heard this blanket accusation repeatedly made in recent months, and always without a shred of supporting evidence...
...Hence it is that so many temperate first-hand observers agree: "Not the Anti-saloon League, but the organized booze business, passed the Eighteenth Amendment...
...TO the Editor:-As one who admires your paper and yet is amazed at its variation as to character of criticism and the subjects selected for criticism, I would like to know why this lack of unity and vacillation is so evident...
...unmindful of observation and experience, inseparable from discussion of prohibition...
...The secretary of the Poplar Settlement Council had been received in private audience by the Holy Father, who assured her that he knew the docks and appreciated intimately the work we are trying to do at Poplar...
...Charles J. Byrnes of Pittsburgh, published in The Commonweal for March 5? Here Mr...
...Why the great American public whether Jewish, Protestant or Catholic must be written down to, talked down to, sung down to, preached down to, acted down to, is quite beyond my simple brain...
...The duty of asking for money is to me not only unpleasant but quite new...
...Intelligent it was, and more than temperate...
...Followed utilization of the adventitious aid of war-time, especially the acquiescent aid of deep-seated and widely diffused hostility to the American saloon in all of its social, moral and political manifestations: "If the saloons won't be controlled, then let prohibition come...
...In this conviction I feel it a matter for concern that some few Catholics should attempt publicly to defend such reprehensible legislation...
...suddenly one's joy evaporates for one suddenly realizes that Ludwig, the king of present-day charlatan writers, was the recipient of valuable space in a review of his latest book...
...The thought proved how far from technical was the blessing he gave to all who in any way helped the Poplar Settlement...
...Hence, it is neither strange nor blameworthy that under the circumstances their issues should reflect their altered views...
...I should like to make some observations, highly personal no doubt, but then so subjectively written is the large part of the content of your paper that perhaps a personal view will be overlooked as a mere symptom of disappointment in the development of what you frequently set forth as your ideal...
...Yet Father Ross, whose Evolution of a Moderate Drinker he extols, gives Mr...
...The whole case, whether for or against prohibition, can scarcely be predicated upon what is done by (old or young) country-club, road-house, cocktail-party, hip-gin, speakeasy and night-club addicts, the aggregate number and importance of whom are relatively inconsequential...
...It has seemed one-sided, at times intolerantly so...
...that expression goes the way of old good intentions and instead our sweet, smug, mediocre feelings are no more harmed than they would be if we sat and carefully read the morning newspaper...
...By the same post came pleasant news from Rome...
...If, however, it occasions so personal a kindness from the Holy Father, it has its more-than-compensations...
...While it is admitted that many of the published opinions against prohibition are "mere harangue," prohibitionists should bear in mind that this taunt cuts two ways: the harangue against prohibition is engendered by the endless cant offered in support of it...
...For if there is, to an onlooker, anything less tolerable than the fanaticism of the dry ballyhoo, it is the preponderant selfishness and hypocrisy of the wet ballyhoo...
...Impossible to spend those coins...
...Rev...
...but, in the intervening decade, their publishers in common with multitudes of us, have come to sense the intrinsic wrongness of national prohibition...
...secondly, force of custom which leads men to accept too unquestioningly what has been accepted before their time...
...Father Ross might have cited an apposite Chicago example of that last, and doubtless many another locality could supply analogues...
...TO the Editor:-May I comment on a letter from Mr...
...Cook had nothing to say and no right to say it, Mr...
...cogent pleas for a return to the states of rights originally exercised by them but now strangely wielded from Washington...
...THE STREETS OF THE CITY London, Eng...
...Preference is given no one, our method of selecting letters which appear being as impersonal as is humanly possible...
...Murphy's paragraph following his quotation of the Cook article re Greek civilization is as biased as any thing Cook could have said...
...and by an almost incredibly delicate instinct, gave her forty-five gold sovereigns of Victorian mintage, and she was assured that if only he had been able to find five more, she would have received them...
...The anti-saloon campaign in its earlier stages-and I had frequent close-ups of it then-was for "option" legislation...
...Byrnes's gratuitous charge of anti-prohibitionist insincerity, I would call his attention to the fact that "constructive thought" in this matter has repeatedly appeared in the press of Pittsburgh...
...For several pre-Volstead decades we had a local regulation in Chicago by which a given locality or neighborhood, if devoid of saloons, could be made no-saloon-territory upon petition by the requisite preponderance of property owners...
...If only some one could add about five more reasons as to why we grow worse...
...In an article under the heading For a New Noah's Ark, in the issue of February 26, one joyfully reads a keen exposition of the state of modern life...
...J. B. Keller...
...these and much other matter of a constructive nature appear in our journals...
...Roger Bacon summed up for Pope Clement four grounds for human ignorance: First, trust in inadequate authority...
...I have duly thanked the individual donors...
...In a splendid editorial of some weeks back you enunciated what to any cultured person would seem the ideal apologist, but in subsequent articles any resemblance to that ideal is so far fetched as to be laughable...
...a portion of the public press is full of paid propaganda . . ." is one that should be specific...
...But thereafter, proposals to establish no-saloon-territory elsewhere seldom or never got through the city council without a fight to the last breath by representatives of the saloon interest...
...Anyhow, that is the considered opinion of one who does not and never did believe prohibition to be the best expedient, but will not vote to abandon it until some definite saloon-excluding alternative is proposed...
...I thank you for the Father Ross article especially because it revives hope that your perspective-catholic or Catholic-is not hopelessly distorted...
...In part these consisted of warnings of national danger inherent in the spirit that would increase authority concentrated in the federal government...
...Until circumstances like that and a multitude of others are forgotten, many fairly reputable and liberal-minded citizens will stay cold, with Father Ross, on the aggressive wet idea of personal liberty...
...GOOD INTENTIONS Williamstown, Mass...
...Wilson, Pa...
...TO the Editor:-May I briefly but warmly thank The Commonweal for the response made, by its means, to my article, The Streets of the City...
...cruelly forgetful of the hurts our people, especially the Irish, have had from drink...
...One of the most unfortunate things for temperance workers is that national prohibition came too soon...
...C. C. Martindale...
...Wet ballyhoo seems to ignore some sources of the public acquiescence which (more than popular demand) gave us the Eighteenth Amendment...
...Persistence of that old and widely diffused, but seldom logically analytical, hostility to the saloon, may be enough to abort the best efforts of the modificationists until they evolve a definite program, whether for repeal or modification, instead of assaulting our ears and patience with hysterical shrieks, cooked statistics and crocodile sobs over the "undermining" effects of the Eighteenth Amendment and its Volstead offspring...
...Why ignore it to worship the golden calf of coerced economic betterment paraded as mass morality...
...I am convinced that our national integrity is in grave jeopardy from the continued enactment of federal legislation having a quasi-moral motive...
...What have we...
...Therefore substantiation of the "paid propaganda" charge is in order...
...Expansion of this program to include a constitutional amendment was stimulated (in ways too complex for brief exposition here) by the obstacles set up against "option...
...Byrnes is a defender of the Eighteenth Amendment and its enforcing "laws...
...At least a single instance to substantiate the charge should be given...
...Nothing, just an occasional expression of what might be a policy but alas...
...Those whose letters do not appear may rest assured that we have appreciated hearing from them, that we would gladly publish what they wrote if space permitted, and that we invite them to contribute again...
...Your readers, with whom these and analogous considerations have weight, may be only a minority, but perhaps a minority not wholly negligible...
...I know of no successful experiment in making men moral in the mass by civil legislation lethally enforced...
...Immediate resort to accusation and denunciation in the face of criticism is, I think, evidence of conscious positional weakness...
...Mary Rood...
...its tone was indeed restrained, especially in those passages on conditions observed in Chicago, on "all the talk about personal liberty," and on the unwillingness of drinking advocates "to give others the freedom not to drink" or to protect themselves against drinkers...
...Bernard J. Mullaney...
...If the coming of national prohibition had depended upon me, I would certainly have deferred it...
...One of the first, if not the very first, applications of this regulation was to bar saloons from a locality in which brewery barons had built costly homes...
...The editorial policy of our papers in the first flush of prohibition was all that our dry friends could ask...
...It is, however, impossible to acknowledge receipt of letters to the editor or to return missives not used.-The Editors...
...Byrnes, setting forth some views on the present state of the prohibition controversy, permits himself to generalize, I think, unwisely...
...Byrnes small comfort here, for he says: "Naturally I had nothing to do with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...thirdly, placing of confidence in the opinion of the inexperienced...
...Concerning opposition to prohibition on the part of journals, his charge that...
...Even at this late, I would add my thanks to you for letting it in and for the editorial notation upon it as "temperate and intelligent...
...Passing over Mr...
...You might be surprised by a count of the like-minded...
...We Catholics have our own machinery for promoting temperance...
...EVOLUTION OF A MODERATE DRINKER Chicago, Ill...
...A diligent reader of Pittsburgh's syndicate press, I submit that these journals are eminently fair in the treatment they accord dry folk and their views...
...and I believe further that these enactments are not law by the test of a rule of right reason...
...Is not defense of human rights above property rights a constructive thought...
...TO the Editor:-By the mischance of interrupted personal routine, I have been unaware until now of Evolution of a Moderate Drinker, by Father Ross, in The Commonweal of November 20, 1929...
...Some of us who are often abroad at hours when the manifestations of excessive drinking are most easily seen, and who have contact with obvious social and economic conditions in the mass-we are left cold also by the claims of "more drinking now than before Volstead...
...To some readers, your temper and tone on prohibition have been-call it disappointing...
...That they are not enthusiastic about the bizarre opinions of prominent dry spokesmen is no proper reason to disparage these publishers...
...How familiar it all sounds...
...and fourthly, hiding of one's own ignorance with a parade of a superficial wisdom...
...And the tone is so typical in all such matters finally one feels the futility of helping to combat unscholarly understanding of civilization at any period...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 23
