From Temperance to Wheelerism

...1 prepared arguments on this proposition for the congressmen and have sent them out for distribution in the states...

...The Act requires the filing of a detailed statement of receipts of over $100 by all committees, associations or organizations which shall in two or more states influence the result, or attempt to influence the result, of an election at which representatives in Congress are to be elected...

...And yet, after all its thirty-five years of effort, after all its cruelty and dishonesty, what has the Anti-saloon League accomplished...

...it was then an easy task to persuade the congressional committee to name Volstead to fill the vacancy...

...In Detroit a more recent investigation of the federal grand jury indicates that the yearly graft of border control officials amounts to $2,000,000...

...How could an innocent educational, scientific and charitable society be so completely misinterpreted...

...If the League had now devoted itself to consolidating its successes it might possibly have maintained the positions it had gained...

...There is no record of what either may have written to the other in 1924, but it could hardly have been in the nature of congratulations on a successful year...

...Certainly the prohibitionist, the police officer, the bootlegger, and the drunkard will not worry...

...their appeal was to the conscience, not to the law...

...Congress began to grow restive under his long-continued domination, and his own friends permitted him to be severely grueled by Senator James Reed in the investigating committee of 1926...

...When its attention was called to the matter in 1920 it protested, claiming that its activities were "educational, scientific and charitable rather than political, as intended by law...

...While the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment was under discussion its most powerful organized enemies, the German-American Alliance and the United States Brewers' Association, came under governmental investigation for disloyalty, both investigations being secretly started by Wayne B. Wheeler, attorney of the Anti-saloon League, whose resolutions were introduced into Congress by Senator William King and Senator Wesley Jones...

...As Wheeler wrote jubilantly to a colleague: You have doubtless seen the way the newspapers have taken up the German-American Alliance...

...Prohibition-difficult though it may be to believe-actually began as a relatively sane "temperance" movement...

...We could not have bought for $50,000 what we have gotten on the investigation...

...But the League stood ready to supply all needed sophistries...

...In the single city of Philadelphia an investigation in 1928 showed that a ring of bootleggers acting under assumed names had handled accounts of $10,000,000 in the Union Bank and Trust Company...

...In Michigan three violators of the liquor law were actually so sentenced, including a woman, Mrs...

...A close friend of Harry M. Daugherty, he wrote to him on December 21, 1922: Nineteen twenty-two will always be remembered by yourself and your friends as one of your most eventful and successful years...

...They were often zealots...

...Thus Congressman Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota, who introduced the so-called Volstead Act, has been visited in the public mind with misdirected opprobrium...

...With the political power which it now had, the League would quite possibly, in any case, have succeeded in its purpose, but the war made its task immeasurably easier...

...The notion that moral strength is to be gained by flight from temptation was already abroad in the land...

...Nor will the citizen whose transient interest ceases when his transient thirst is gratified...

...The voice was Volstead's, but the brain was Wheeler's...

...Congressmen are dependent upon us today to defend their position from a legal standpoint as never before...

...Justin Steu-art, Wheeler's publicity secretary, writes in his Wayne Wheeler, Dry Boss: Wheeler frequently asserted that he took the suggestions offered by the League's special committee, combined them with his own rough draft, and produced the bill which, when some minor changes were made, became the Volstead Act...

...but they still recognized the right of personal liberty...

...It aimed to utilize the Protestant churches to build up a political machine...

...They show Wheeler eager and aggressive, Harding mildly enthusiastic over the tale of dry victories but definitely responsive to news of Republican success...

...In Pittsburgh an investigation in the same year by the Allegheny County grand jury revealed a similar state of corruption, with officially recognized bootleggers who controlled the sale of liquor in their respective districts...

...By 1826 the original meaning of the word "temperance" was so far forgotten that the American Temperance Union could be formed, with members now pledging themselves to total abstinence from spirits...

...With a strange reluctance, in such a moral organization, to reveal the sources of its income, the League has never filed any such returns...

...The prosperity of the bootlegger is, of course, sufficient evidence of the enormous amount of drinking that goes on...

...Coming from Ohio, Wheeler's native state where his political influence was particularly strong, the new incumbent was ready to give the Anti-saloon leader anything he wanted...

...it would therefore remain permanently in legal control of the situation...

...As some one has said, prohibition was a war bride, married in haste to be repented at leisure...

...They sought to convert, not to constrain...

...We are not willing it be known at present that we started the investigation...

...His death on September 5, 1927, came none too soon to save him from personal defeat...

...Two more quotations from Wheeler, during the elections of 1920, have their interest: The fight for United States Senator Lenroot in Wisconsin, was a fine demonstration of League strategy...

...The trial court failed to see the profound difference, but the Apellate Court, with that legal wisdom so perplexing to the mere layman, decided that the change of name had brought in "an entirely new party...

...Nor would they affect the number of deaths from alcoholism which increased during the same period exactly 300 percent...

...With church members definitely enrolled in its ranks as voters, it approached the political candidate in district, county or state, and demanded his views on the prohibition question...

...If a constitutional amendment could be put over, however, making prohibition a part of the fundamental law of the land, it would not matter whether men changed their minds or not...

...Again Wayne B. Wheeler did the work...

...worst of all, dissension began to appear in the councils of the League, and in 1927 he was publicly reprimanded for certain tactless utterances by the chairman of the League's executive and legislative committees...

...Etta May Miller, mother of ten children...

...By 1840 the movement had extended, in the formation of the Washington Society, to include beer, wine and cider...

...One may readily list its achievements: First, the substitution of the lawless bootlegger for the lawful saloon-keeper...

...Still speaking of corrupt practices, the administration of President Harding coincided with the high point of the League's success...

...The Eighteenth Amendment went hurtling through the country on the shoulders of patriotism...

...Psychologically, if not literally, it was a war measure...

...During the first quarter of the nineteenth century a few fairly important societies were formed in America whose members pledged themselves to moderation in the use of spirits...

...In addition to an established graft rate on every case of beer and whiskey, inspectors receive extra sums for "free nights on the river" when smugglers can bring in as much as they please...

...The tide at last began to turn against this most notorious of the League bosses...

...But there are still some old-fashioned lovers of reason who object to putting their lives and liberties in alien hands, who object to seeing their nation the laughing-stock of the world, who object to letting the United States remain forever the prey of crooks and hypocrites...

...A fair share of this money had gone into regular monthly salaries to the police...

...For a time there seemed to be a complete stampede among the congressmen for a beer and wine amendment...

...The wets had the majority of the votes, but were outgeneraled...

...The extremist policies of Wheelerism, however, were too congenial to the spirit of the League to be abandoned...

...To save Volstead's feelings, Wheeler later modified his statements and did not claim to have done more than to gather together material for the Judiciary Committee's use...

...He called upon Harding and demanded that the latter immediately take a total abstinence pledge...

...The President pleaded with him like a schoolboy, urging that his health might be injured by the abandonment of a life-long habit, but Wheeler was obdurate-He threatened to withdraw the support of the League, and the President capitulated...

...Volstead and our friends in the district realize that, had it not been for the League's activity and support from the very inception of this fight, Mr...

...He never enjoyed the personal influence with the Coolidge administration which he had had under Harding...

...In many places they admit that they cannot defend their position on a ground that a liquor containing y2 oi 1 percent of alcohol is intoxicating in fact...

...I have always had implicit faith in you and I felt sure that the attacks upon you would prove groundless...

...Little remains save to make possession of liquor a capital offense...

...Like the other great latter-day American moralist, Anthony Comstock, Wheeler was either blind or indifferent to political corruption in his associates so long as they supported the particular reform in which he was interested...

...That these salaries were reasonably large were shown in the cases of the three inspectors who were indicted along with eighteen captains...

...The numerous letters between Harding and "My dear Wheeler," given in Steuart's book, are not unamusing...

...The official salaries of inspectors range from $3,000 to $4,000...

...It has continued to insist upon ever more drastic legislation culminating in the Jones Act of 1929, which, following the example of the Michigan prohibition law, makes violation of the liquor statutes a felony...

...He supplied written arguments for embarrassed Congressmen to present to their home constituencies...

...Volstead would have been defeated...

...In Minnesota, Congressman Volstead was defeated in the primary, but the League contested the nomination in the courts, where it was thrown out on grounds of violation of the Corrupt Practices Act...

...Did anyone suppose that it had ever tried to influence an election...

...There was a tendency to misuse the pledge by imposing it on children, but with this exception the opponents of liquor confined themselves to justifiable moral suasion...

...There is no reason to believe that the prohibition leaders would shrink even from that, if they thought by such means to preserve their power...

...The Amendment once adopted, the next event of importance was the drawing up of the Enforcement Act...

...In the general uncertainty as to just what the Act meant or how it should be applied, Wheeler, as its real author, became the unofficial adviser of the Treasury and Justice Departments...

...The League could always count upon a sufficient minority to block the repeal of the amendment...

...In states like Michigan, which also had the Baumes law, making mandatory life imprisonment for a fourth conviction of felony, a person might be sent to prison for life for manufacturing a pint of homebrew or letting a keg of cider stand too long in his cellar...

...Both Mr...

...The three gentlemen in Philadelphia had bank accounts, respectively, of over $40,000, $102,000, and $193,000...

...They are giving it almost as much attention as the Acts of Congress itself...

...Secondly, the corruption of vast numbers of government officials...

...He wrote: I have had to keep in close touch with the congressmen during these primary campaigns...

...If these figures should be discounted somewhat on the score of increased police activity or increased necessity of mentioning intoxication when it is the cause of arrest, such reservations surely would not account for the entire increase...

...This was done regardless of the candidate's record on all other issues, regardless of his fitness for office, regardless even of his own personal habits in the use of liquor...

...Congressmen had become accustomed to being rubber stamps for the Anti-saloon League...

...Thirdly, a great increase in actual drunkenness as compared with moderate drinking...

...Once the opposition to prohibition was identified with pro-Germanism, the end was certain...

...To the one whose record and replies were most satisfactory it then delivered the votes...

...But in its eyes there was one fatal defect in all the legislation that had been passed: it might be overturned if men later changed their minds...

...Nevertheless, in the first half-century of our national existence there was no such thing as legal prohibition...

...In New York state, when the same issue arose and proceedings were brought against it, the League took similar ground, and also pointed out that the charges were made against the Anti-saloon League of New York, whereas, although this was the name which the League had latterly used, it was originally incorporated as the New York Anti-saloon League...

...Among the many candidates for the office of prohibition commissioner, Wheeler simply selected the one that suited him, and on his appointment wrote Harding to thank him for his "cooperation," taking occasion also to issue a discreet warning as to the President's personal habits by copying out a scandalous article from the AutoPiano Weekly, "in order that you may know what kind of information is going out from some of the correspondents...

...What a complete misunderstanding...

...If he would only vote to compel others not to drink, he might drink as much as he pleased himself, for all the Anti-saloon League cared...

...How many such lovers of reason are left, only the future can tell...

...But why go on to labor points which every honest man admits...

...Arrests for drunkenness in the period from 1920 to 1927 increased by over 125 percent...

...Even so early, the reformers had evidently begun to lose their sense of humor and their power of discrimination...

...Speaking of the Corrupt Practices Act, what of the League...

...It was not known...

...The Anti-saloon League introduced a new policy into the prohibition movement...

...Supported partly by the genuine hostility of a large share of the public toward the saloon, but chiefly by the powerful political machine which it built up, by 1917 the League was able to picture in its famous charts the whole country a chaste white aside from a few black regions of vice extending inland from the intellectual and cultural centres-New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and New Orleans...

...At last in 1923 Wheeler decided to crown his career with a master stroke-nothing less than to induce the President of the United States to obey the law...