Evolution of a Moderate Drinker
Ross, J. Elliot
EVOLUTION OF A MODERATE DRINKER By J. ELLIOT ROSS Prohibition remains the central topic in an unceasing debate. Though The Commonweal is editorially of the opinion that the Eighteenth Amendment...
...Our parish was in the old First Ward, represented in the city council by the famous political characters, Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John...
...If it had been a big thing, it would merely have been the surer argument that I needed total abstinence for my own sake...
...As I grew to manhood in "the gay nineties," I sampled nearly every kind of intoxicating drink that was then popular-and I liked them all...
...By patronizing bootleggers cooperate with the system that produces bootleggers...
...If he gets the drink habit, he becomes a life-long slave...
...Moreover, I could hardly preach total abstinence to others while drinking myself...
...Some are immune, but others will certainly fall victims if they are exposed...
...But as long as it did come, I observe it...
...Antis ought to be sports enough to see this...
...Somehow, I am not credulous enough to believe that it just came across the Canadian border, or a friend brought it over in the Leviathan...
...At our rectory we had a constant stream of men and women seeking material and spiritual help because they had been conquered in their fight against liquor...
...They are very real...
...and there are thousands in the same situation...
...They would be slaves until they died...
...What should have gone for food and clothing and rent and education, went for drink...
...or who simply oppose prohibition with no probability whatever of being able to repeal it, while doing nothing about the present abuse of liquor...
...I recall the case of one man boarding with a widow, who beat her nine-year-old boy into unconsciousness and was discovered applying a lighted cigarette to the boy's wounds...
...They needed total abstinence, and to practise total abstinence they needed the encouragement of my example...
...Doubtless many of them had been just as strong as I ever was...
...These men and women had sold their birthright of human freedom for a momentary gratification of their palate...
...Weighing the pleasure I might get from an occasional julep against the good of saving even one man from drunkenness, there was but one conclusion...
...But all the unjust discrimination in the country was as a molehill to a mountain compared to the handicap hundreds of thousands of Catholics voluntarily put upon themselves by the abuse of liquor...
...The dangers of pure liquor were bad enough...
...I wanted to prevent the evils of drink...
...But the sight of these people gave me pause...
...When under the influence of liquor, men are worse than beasts because they have given up their power of self-determination, and have no instincts to guide them...
...In 1917 in regard to drugs and liquors I wrote: "If it be found that the privilege of using such articles is invariably abused by such a large number of persons that the good of the whole community or a large part of the whole is endangered...
...Whole families ended in the slough of some slum...
...and if the abuse can be stopped by prohibition: then the state has a perfect right to prohibit...
...However, I was willing to take a chance and voted for state prohibition in Texas...
...The man who drinks to excess gives up his freedom while under the influence of liquor...
...I was a teetotaller before Volstead, and if the dangers of pre-prohibition liquor led me to total abstinence, I would be foolish to change now...
...As far as I am concerned, total abstinence is a very small price to pay for avoiding cooperation in what comes out of bootlegging...
...And the conclusion forced itself on me that the only sure way, to prevent drunkenness was total abstinence...
...The so-called cures were usually not permanently effective...
...Personally, I had no doubt about the abuse of drink endangering a sufficiently large part of society to warrant prohibitory legislation, although I did have considerable doubt in regard to the effectiveness of prohibition...
...The drink habit held no terrors for me, because I was sure of my own strength...
...My ideal was moderate drinking, and I had no use for either prohibition, or total abstinence...
...A certain percentage of these moderate drinkers, if they kept on drinking, would go to excess...
...The further step was inevitable, that the only absolutely sure way of protecting my own self from danger was to be a total abstainer...
...I sometimes say they converted me to total abstinence...
...These men meant well, but their wills had been weakened by continual yielding...
...And unfortunately it was not only the guilty drunkards who suffered...
...She was nearly killed, and had to give up her liberty completely for several months in a hospital...
...And I wondered if something of the twisted psychology by which crazy people think they are sane did not apply here...
...I could not draw a check without hearing the sobs of women widowed and children orphaned by the activity of bootleggers...
...Moreover, I cannot see how the purchaser of bootleg liquor escapes cooperation in the graft and corruption and violence connected with bootlegging...
...We know as much about what would have been without the Eighteenth Amendment as the boy did about the taste of his hypothetical brother for cherry pie...
...My conscience tells me to be a total abstainer...
...I grew up in a home where we always had both fermented and distilled beverages, and nobody went to excess...
...They ridicule the abstainer...
...If the coming of national prohibition had depended upon me, I would certainly have deferred it...
...I have given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pledges, but I knew in my heart that most of them were useless...
...the throwing of responsibility on him would not have cleared me completely...
...I like most kinds of intoxicating drinks but it was only a tiny mortification to give them up...
...A large percentage of the profanity, blasphemy, quarreling, prostitution, rape, incest, murder afflicting our country was the outcome of drink...
...Innocent wives, mothers, children were involved...
...Perhaps the surer a man was of his own strength, the greater wa"s the danger of his going to excess...
...I had once gloried in my strength, and had imagined that I could continue indefinitely as a moderate drinker...
...I was twenty-five, and seven years out of college, when I started my studies for the priesthood, and I did not doubt my ability to remain a moderate drinker all my life...
...If I were convinced that the Volstead Law was all wrong, I would think it only the part of ordinary prudence to take some other way of showing my disapproval than by exposing myself to the danger of poison liquor...
...They had, most of them, been confident of their own strength...
...Or be a total abstainer...
...However, the rule of the Paulist novitiate was total abstinence, and of course I fell in line...
...And we served a hospital that made a specialty of delirium tremens cases...
...The obvious retort would be, "Physician, heal thyself...
...But as it seemed practically impossible to reform in any great numbers those who were already drunkards, the only hope was in keeping down the number of recruits...
...From that Chicago experience three conclusions stand out very vividly in my mind...
...To me the case is clear...
...Sometimes they were literally in the gutter...
...And there is no way of telling ahead of time in which class anyone will be...
...From the vantage point of my nine years' experience, I set my boyish will against the venerable Cardinal Gibbons when I was confirmed, and refused to take the pledge he was accustomed to give...
...There in a series of padded cells, euphemistically called "the bungalow," we attended men and women who had been made worse than beasts by drink...
...It was no consolation whatever that the cause of the accident was vindicating his freedom...
...The tickling of my gullet would have been no justification...
...The question is hypothetical, and reminds me of the boy who was asked if his brother liked cherry pie...
...Hinky Dink, in those pre-Volstead days, kept a saloon and advertised the largest schooner in the city for $.05...
...It is possible that there would have been less abuse of liquor today, if national prohibition had not come when it did...
...Though The Commonweal is editorially of the opinion that the Eighteenth Amendment has introduced greater social evils than those it was designed to remedy, it is likewise committed to opening its columns to other views of the matter...
...At any rate, one of my earliest recollections-I must have been about three years old-is having a sangaree just before being tucked into bed at night...
...They are trying to build up a group opinion that will force others to indulge...
...And I cannot understand the reasoning of those who deplore these evils, yet buy bootleg stuff...
...I suspect that if family is taken in a broad sense, there was hardly a family in the country that had not had at least one member wrecked by drink...
...If I bought bootleg liquor, I could not open my pocketbook without seeing the mountainous graft and civic corruption that is associated with the system...
...We believe that it will be regarded as temperate and intelligent even by those who disagree with it.-The Editors...
...All the talk about personal liberty leaves me cold...
...Secondly, I came to believe that once a man had the drink habit badly he was almost hopeless...
...the dangers of bootleg stuff are worse...
...For the rest, the section was made up principally of poor tenements, very cheap lodging houses and pawn shops...
...There are more ways of depriving a man of his liberty than by passing a law, and the drinkers by their indulgence interfere with the liberty of non-drinkers to a much greater extent than prohibitionists interfere with the liberty of the antis...
...And then after being stationed in Chicago as a priest, I became a total abstainer and an advocate of total abstinence for others...
...They had all at one time been moderate drinkers...
...And what am I to do in the face of these evils...
...One of the most unfortunate things for temperance workers is that national prohibition came too soon...
...And if it were a big price, I would gladly pay it...
...Catholics sometimes complain of the unjust discrimination against them...
...On Clark and State and Dearborn Streets one could see the wrecks of humanity drifting along with dissipation written clearly in their blotched faces and shambling gait...
...The following article by Father Ross expresses the point of view of those Catholics, more numerous than is sometimes believed, who hold that total abstinence is the only right attitude toward liquor...
...I could not feel easy in conscience if I were the means of exposing to this dreadful disease a man who would contract it...
...And the intensity of the evil was appalling...
...They call him a killjoy, a Puritan, a long-faced hypocrite...
...Being convinced of the advantages of total abstinence, I feel that I am vindicating my freedom by not drinking...
...I do not know, and I do not know any way of determining the matter absolutely...
...Studying these victims of drink led me to my third conclusion-that no one can be absolutely sure of himself...
...First of all, I came to believe that the drink evil, in intensity and extent, was the most important social problem we faced as a nation...
...But the evils of the present day are not hypothetical...
...Let him who thinketh himself to stand, take heed lest he fall...
...But he had plenty of competition...
...MARK TWAIN says somewhere that his first lie was as a baby when he pretended a pin was sticking him, because he had learned this would lead to cuddling...
...The man who could entirely eradicate this evil among Catholics would be a veritable Moses leading his people out of a bondage worse than the Egyptian-into a desert dryness...
...Well, if you had a brother, would he like cherry pie...
...no bootleggers, no graft, no shooting of enforcement officers, or of others...
...There was a saloon on every corner in some blocks, and sometimes one in the middle of the square, too...
...And while for $5.00 or maybe $1.00 you can get liquor tested, the test applies only to the more easily detected poisons...
...As far as I can see, drink interferes a great deal more with personal liberty than does the Volstead Law...
...Christmas would not have seemed like Christmas without egg-nog, and there was nothing so refreshing as a mint julep on a hot summer day...
...I would think it only moral to refuse cooperation in all the evils of bootlegging-the evils of selling to drunkards, of graft, corruption and violence...
...Naturally, I had nothing to do with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...A goodly number of the drinking advocates of personal liberty seem unwilling to give to others the freedom not to drink...
...We are to some extent our brother's keepers, and this applies emphatically to drink...
...No purchasers, no bootleggers...
...I haven't any brother," he said...
...One of these drinking advocates of personal liberty, while under the influence of liquor ran down the daughter of a friend of mine...
...But persuading individuals to total abstinence is a slow process...
...Pride goeth before a stumble...
...I may have started that early as a moderate drinker, but my memory is not as precocious as Mark Twain's...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 3
