To the historian of the future it may appear as either a great tragedy or a great comedy that the American people at a critical moment of transition such as the present could find no subject more worthy of their attention than the problem of a liquor regime. It is a great misfortune that American opinion should be distracted by the liquor question at a moment when problems of foreign relations and industrial organization ought to be receiving the benefit of all the political wisdom at our command. It is a further misfortune that our thought on this question is governed by a legacy of emphasis on Prohibition, the product of a movement that has come down into the twentieth century with the fuzz of the 1830’s about its ears. [p.4]
The liquor controversy is a conflict between two hardened and self-contained dogmatic systems. The official Dry position differs from the official Wet position on questions of organic chemistry, dietetics, pharmacy, biology, religion, psychology, jurisprudence and political philosophy, as well as on the interpretation of statistics on economic conditions. The rivalry between these two systems, each of which is seeking with evangelical zeal to indoctrinate the people, now threatens to paralyze our most promising political enterprises and to handicap with the dead weight of popular indifference the most necessary movements of social reform.
If we wake up some time to find that our social organization has developed a new feudalism, or that our bungling of foreign affairs has brought us to a world war, we will have to compare ourselves with those populations of the decadent Roman Empire which, while their civilization dissolved about them, resorted to riot and civil strife to prove that the Deity was homo-usian rather [p.5] than homoi-usian with Christ, or that the Divine and Human in Jesus were formed in one nature rather than in two.
What prospect is there that the period of darkness will soon be ended and the liquor question brought to some kind of equilibrium in which it will cease to be the major political distraction of the country? What kind of victory by Wets or Drys would suffice to take the issue out of the forum and put it on the shelf? This is a vital question which partisans on both sides must answer, for unless they can answer it they must be reckoned as irresponsible agitators rather than as statesmen.
If a neutral observer, unpledged to the doctrinal system of either camp, analyzes the program of the Drys and the numerous programs of the Wets, he finds that none of them can meet this elementary test. Both parties are fighting for the adoption of policies the consequences of which they have not thought through to the end. Both sides are the helpless victims of a legacy [p.6] of error. The Prohibition program was not a product of enlightened statecraft, not a careful adaptation of means to end, like, for example, the Federal Reserve System. It was a program defined by a greatest common denominator of enthusiasm and a least common multiple of intelligence in the American housewife and the American clergyman, neither of whom was trained in the social sciences. The generation which formulated the liquor question as an issue in criminal law was not cognizant of the real intricacy of the problem of social control to which it addressed itself. And the issue formulated in this haphazard way determined not only the attitude of the Drys but that of the Wets as well.
The Prohibition issue is a legacy handed down to us through four generations of earnest American agitators. If you would see the social atmosphere in which the issue took form, go to Tocqueville’s great essay on Democracy in America, where one of the keenest minds of the nineteenth century analyzes the United States of the 1830’s. [p.7] “No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamour is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the satisfaction of their social wants. Everything is in motion around you; here the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; a little further, the delegates of a district are posting to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; in another place the farmers quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a public school. Meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the conduct of the government; whilst in other assemblies, citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country. Societies are formed which regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils of the state, and solemnly bind themselves to give an example of temperance … If an American were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one-half of his [p.8] existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.”
Tocqueville noted, further, the tendency of this nation of busybodies to turn constantly to the legislature for new laws on all subjects: “A single glance at the archives of the different States convinces me that the activity of the legislator never slackens.” And he recognized the danger to the future in a state of things in which the majority had such unlimited power that “no obstacles exist which can impede or even retard its progress, so as to make it heed the complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path.” He observed, moreover, that the majority “claims the right, not only of making the laws, but of breaking the laws it has made.”
“I said one day to an inhabitant of Pennsylvania: ‘Be so good as to explain to me how it happens, that in a State founded by Quakers, and celebrated for its toleration free Blacks are not allowed to exercise civil rights. They pay taxes. Is it not fair that they should vote?’ [p.9]
“‘You insult us,’ replied my informant, ‘if you imagine that our legislators have committed so gross an act of injustice and intolerance.’
“‘Then the Blacks possess the right of voting in this country?’
“‘Without doubt.’
“‘How comes it, then, that at the polling booth, this morning, I did not perceive a single Negro in the meeting?’
“‘It is not the fault of the law; the Negroes have an undisputed right of voting; but they voluntarily abstain from making their appearance.’
“‘A very pretty piece of modesty on their part!’ rejoined I.
“‘Why, the truth is, they are not disinclined to vote, but they are afraid of being maltreated; in this country, the law is sometimes unable to maintain its authority, without the support of the majority. But in this case, the majority entertains very strong prejudices against the Blacks, and the magistrates are unable to protect them in the exercise of their legal rights.’”
This was in 1831. We did not need to wait for the Civil War and the Fifteenth Amendment in order to initiate the policy of nullifying by administration what we had done in legislation. The [p.10] whole machine of agitation, legislation and nullification was set up and running in Tocqueville’s time, and the prohibition platform was some of the grist of its grinding.
That the program of liquor control formulated in the era 1830-1840 should be suited to the America of 1930-1940 is not intrinsically more probable than that Jackson’s policy toward the National Bank would afford a model for our present treatment of problems of stock-market speculation and farm relief. The liquor program was stated in the beginning with a certain hyperbole of diction, a preoccupation with biblical illustrations and criminal law analogies which were inevitable in the 1830’s, but are out of step with contemporary ways of thought. The sermons preached on the subject ninety years ago do not betray their date. Here is an example:
“The distiller, wholesale and retail dealers, know that they are engaged in a body and soul destroying business, and are virtually ruining their fellow creatures by wholesale: the beam cries out against the timber, and the stone against the wall. … [p.11]
“I can hardly let moderation be known when I reflect upon this subject. What! License men to deal in liquid fire? Alcohol? That is destroying thirty thousand men, made in the image of God, every year.
“With equally as much propriety, might they license men to furnish themselves with daggers, to thrust into the heart of every man who they suppose may be possessed of a four-pence-half-penny.
“The only apology that can be made for licensing men to sell intoxicating drinks, is, that the law, regulating the sale, was formed at a time, when the community thought they were useful as a drink, at least when moderately used. But thank God, that day has passed by, and the community, not only sees the subject, as trees walking, but clearly; and instead of aiming, only to bark up the tree of intemperance, and to crop off its branches, they are aiming at the root, and if they persevere they will destroy the root with all its branches.”
This sermon, preached in 1811, might equally well have been preached in 1918. Were it not for the antiquated punctuation which inserts more commas than a modern stylebook would permit, one might well take it as an excerpt from a recent [p.12] speech on the subject. All the principal elements of the doctrine of Prohibition were present a century ago, and have not changed materially since that time.
These clergymen of the 1830’s had a grievance against the liquor industry, which their habits of thought did not permit them to formulate in any other way than as a demand that liquor-selling be made a crime. They were familiar with no juridical technique for limiting the exercise of property rights; they had such confirmed respect for absolute rights in private property that nothing less than criminality seemed to them an adequate cause for invading the prerogative of the individual to buy, to sell, to own and to possess whatever he would. The idea of peculiar kinds of property invested with a public interest and subject to public control was not taught to the people till the age of railway and monopoly politics of the last quarter of the century. Even the kind of attack on absolute property rights which an employer’s liability law contains, in that it compels [p.13] an employer to pay for something not his fault, was strange to this generation. If there was something about the liquor industry which distinguished it from other enterprises, the good clergy-men could only assume that it must be a criminal trait, to be illustrated by the analogy of the assassin licensed by law to use a dagger. Modern social science could easily provide more illuminating parallels to illustrate the relation of the liquor industry to society. But the problem was not set up as a problem in social science until long after the preachers had dictated what the answer must be.
The intellectual equipment of the age which formulated the Prohibition platform was deficient not only on the side of the social sciences; its knowledge of the natural sciences was also far inferior to our own. The doctrine that drinking is harmful even in moderation entered the theology of Prohibition at a time when medical science was still permitting blood-letting as a cure for fever and sending consumptives to kill themselves by a [p.14] regime of starvation and violent exercise. The official Prohibition view of the effect of alcohol on the human body was thoroughly articulated before Liebig had founded the science of organic chemistry, and before there was either a theory of cell structure or a technique for the study of metabolism. With respect to pedagogy, the dictum “spare the rod and spoil the child” was orthodox doctrine when the Prohibition crusade began. A century of intellectual progress which altered and expanded our knowledge of alcohol, human nature, and society did not alter in the slightest the program that was already being preached when de Tocqueville visited these strange shores.
It is possible that the Prohibitionists of 1840, with supernatural prescience, hit upon the one best liquor policy for their great-great-grandchildren to adopt. But the question of the aptness of the solution in modern life is difficult to discuss because the debate now runs in a rut worn with a century of dubious assertion and reply. The new facts as they have come to our knowledge, the [p.15] new conditions as they have made themselves felt, have been given their place in both arguments. The automobile is held to make Prohibition at once more necessary and less enforceable; the new psychology affords to the Wets new reasons for regarding the moderate use of liquor as desirable, and to the Drys a new basis for doubting whether such a thing as “self-control” can be trusted to prevent harmful excess.
All the proposals now actually before the public, whether they emanate from Wet or Dry sources, are formed either positively or negatively by the Prohibition model. You may have either Prohibition or a substitute for Prohibition; take your choice! What you cannot have is a policy or attitude toward liquor, freely thought out on the basis of contemporary knowledge and present-day facts, unprejudiced by a legacy of emphasis upon this one particular device which our good forefathers thought would solve the liquor problem. This is what they must mean who say that Prohibition is not a policy but a predicament. [p.16]
Were it only possible to clear the ground and attack the whole problem afresh, who knows what the result would be? Surely it must be possible to formulate some attitude toward liquor upon which the people of America would be more likely to reach contented agreement than on either the Prohibition or anti-Prohibition proposals now before the country. For it does not appear that either the Wets or the Drys are at present equipped with a liquor program which will bring an end to the agitation, quiet the turmoil, and permit the country to devote its attention to more important things. [p.17]