The Volsteadian Front
THE VOLSTEADIAN FRONT TDISHOP CANNON has been excused from posing ^-* as a rebel. This is in keeping with our predictions and, we think, with general sanity. As constituted, the lobby committee...
...He himself accepts his record as something which cannot be elucidated in public...
...It is more desperately needed than ever before in the nation's history...
...They may be right or wrong...
...Unfortunately, the converse is not true...
...All these Fisherisms are more than nonsense...
...But to translate them into gibberish about shouldering working-men with taxes is not what one might legitimately expect of a professor of economics...
...and that the breweries, if restored, would supply far more in the way of employment than they exact in the form of revenue...
...It is simply this: the belief that a suggested form of liquor administration can ever be judged on other grounds than those of expediency, the principle that constitutionally enacted drought is a moral mandate...
...Perhaps he is in sympathy with Mr...
...As constituted, the lobby committee was almost the last body in the world qualified to investigate the conduct and issues which prevailed in 1928...
...Three statements, indeed, figure prominently in it...
...Fort...
...Hoover, indeed...
...Bishop Cannon dismissed is, perhaps, a far less important figure than Bishop Cannon in the stocks...
...Well, let's talk law enforcement...
...You can do that sort of thing in a nursery, and it may be that Professor Fisher assumed he was addressing children...
...A law unto itself...
...One may deeply deplore the methods and purposes of Bishop Cannon...
...Taxes...
...There are good arguments for Volsteadism...
...To begin with, all this talk of subterranean conspiracies is as futile and apocalytic as the gossip about Jewish protocols and German atrocities...
...Professor Fisher knows as well as anybody else—or ought to—three basic facts: that prohibition has not had the slightest effect on taxes paid directly or indirectly by the working-man, excepting in so far as the burden of enforcement has increased federal expenditures...
...The second charge is even more specious...
...But not even the highest-powered microscope can discern any kind of sense in the oratory dispensed by Dr...
...The thing that separates Bishop Cannon and the agencies he supports from so many of the rest of us is not, in the final analysis, a difference of opinion regarding the properties of alcohol...
...That is, ultimately, the prohibition question in a nut-shell...
...Many excellent men swear by those arguments...
...Raskob, for instance, has set forth plainly and frequently the reasons which have made him a wet...
...He has proved nothing, cleared up nothing...
...Something else entirely holds for Professor Irving Fisher, appearing as a speaker in behalf of Mr...
...Morrow is the agent of this unwholesome aggregation and seeks "to shift a vast burden of taxes on the shoulders of the working-people by restoring the traffic in beer...
...But if we are to get anywhere in that discussion, it is clearly necessary to adopt a language different from Professor Fisher's novel mothergoose rhymes about veiled interests, rich villains in hiding and working-men burdened with an extra penny a glass...
...The first is that "powerful interests" have been amalgamated under the leadership of "a group of millionaires" who have entered into "a natural political alliance with the United States Brewers' Association...
...Possibly he has a secret admiration for Mr...
...Instead of its old-time responsiveness to the popular will, the government is extending its powers and is not only lending itself to an excess of laws—sumptuary, inquisitorial and regulative—but is becoming a law unto itself...
...Nevertheless the great Emersonian dictum abides, the "light" remains the arbiter of political conduct...
...Franklin Fort, New Jersey dry candidate...
...Fisher...
...that the per capita amount now expended for liquor is greater than it was prior to 1918...
...One must concede, however, that they have their origin in an understandable conception of ethics and polity...
...Opposition to Mr...
...In the palmy days of prohibition propaganda, for instance, it was considered excellent copy to tell off the names of wealthy men who joined Messrs...
...The third rests on the intimation that Mr...
...Speaking in Toronto, Canada, Governor Albert C. Ritchie referred to the problem of "how to make known and enforce the popular will through government" and went on to declare: "We know that no government, however absolute its power, can enforce its will if the will of the people is not responsive...
...Of course the nation is now suffering from a manifest apathy of thought and interest...
...But when it is proved that not all captains of industry share this view, the scenery is quickly shifted and labeled with the sign, "Dire Conspiracy...
...Morrow...
...The second runs to the effect that Mr...
...And if one is patient enough to analyze the charges seriatim, Professor Fisher begins to look like a masterful writer of farce...
...My own country is now an example of this, and if the period were not, as I am convinced it is, a temporary and passing one, it would constitute little less than a crisis in the development of democracy...
...It may be that Mr...
...Even so, the third declaration is really the climax...
...Ford and Kresge in their war on beer...
...But if such a stand constitutes the most serious and dangerous issue in the "great debate," it has at least the virtue of being substantial and intelligible...
...It is no longer conceivable that the President is tied hand and foot to the prohibition department of Yale University...
...Law enforcement, of course...
...Wickersham, no longer utterly arid, is closest to his heart...
...But unless the atmosphere of the White House has dimmed the light of his intelligence, he cannot conceivably be hand in glove with Professor Fisher...
...It would be difficult to compilate a more astounding catalogue of nonsense...
...They are unadulterated claptrap...
...The people's will cannot always be translated into the people's government...
...After all, law enforcement is a relatively serious matter...
...We have recently witnessed the appalling murder of a Chicago newspaperman by an emissary of gangland, who banked on his own immunity and the power of his group...
...Morrow's activities are "bitterly opposed" to the law-enforcement ideas of the President...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 8
