II. Enforcement

What would happen if Prohibition should finally be made to prohibit? The Drys envisage this prospect with the vague exaltation of a middle-aged spinster dreaming of her marriage. With grim determination they demand enforcement. But beyond enforcement – what then?

Have we any reason to hope that if the Prohibition law is once enforced, the country will accept the situation and turn its mind to other questions? Is there any prospect that “effective” Prohibition will solve the liquor problem definitively? The Wets are insincere when they utter the objection that “Prohibition does not prohibit”; if it did prohibit they would love it even less. The Drys are superficial when they devote [p.18] all their thought to devising measures of enforcement without taking into account the place of enforcement in the total social and political life of the country. They run the risk of paying for success with failure, and of enforcing the law only to see it repealed by an exasperated public.

It is difficult to guess just how much of a reign of terror would be necessary in order to bring about complete enforcement. Certainly the cost would be great, both in money and in strain upon the political system. But despite these great costs, if the Prohibitionists can maintain their voting majority, it is not impossible that they may render the law effective. There are in human nature a great many cheap or contemptible traits which will contribute to their success. If it becomes a little dangerous to buy liquor many buyers will retire from the market, for the great majority of men are lacking in courage; moreover, those who do not dare to drink will not care to see others enjoy what they are too timid to take, for meanness and envy lurk in most souls; and when those [p.19] who have been frightened out of the market suspect that their neighbors are still buying liquor, they will make efforts to verify their suspicions, for who is there who is content to mind his own business? And when they have verified their suspicions, they will speak disparagingly of their neighbor, for hypocrisy is a sin as common as it is deplorable. It is fortunate for the Prohibitionists that in the economy of human endeavor noble intentions can count on the aid of paltry and despicable ones.

But those who accept the Prohibition regime under this kind of pressure will have none of the qualities of a crusading army. The spiritual strength of the Prohibition movement will not increase with its success, but will rather diminish. The opponents of Prohibition, on the contrary, will find their spiritual strength increased as their grievances become more real.

There will remain many free spirits who, even if they conform to the law, will protest the more violently against it the more completely they see [p.20] it enforced. Their voices will be only the more raucous when their throats are dry. And then, when the vigilance of the Prohibitionists slackens, they will form the nucleus of another mass of systematic violators of the law. Nobody can say with any confidence how numerous this remnant of the unconverted will be. The straw vote in Kansas – two thousand out of ten thousand ballots cast for repeal – indicates that this remnant can resist a long regime of enforcement. A relatively small number of Wets can serve to keep the Prohibitionists en vedette, by agitation when the law is enforced, and by violation when it is not.

So long as Prohibition is taken for granted as the pattern for solving the liquor problems, the tension of forces cannot reach equilibrium, for the winning side does not gather strength, but dissipates it, and the losing side gains cohesion and determination from its loss. For Prohibition creates no stabilizing vested interests irrevocably committed to its perpetuation. Most reform projects, [p.21] when carried through, anchor themselves quickly in new institutions and new systems of rights. An agrarian revolution protects itself against reaction because the peasants who have taken over the land have, each of them, a direct interest in resisting attempts of the expropriated landholders to recover their lost rights; a political, democratic revolution tends to protect itself because those who have gained the right to vote will not be willing to give it up; the emancipation of the slaves resulted in the setting up of new political and economic relationships which make the return of slavery in its old form impossible. But with Prohibition the principal vested interests, definitely and immediately committed to its perpetuation, are precisely those which serve best to keep the question in a state of agitation: they are the interests of the bootleggers, the professional anti-saloon organizers, the relatives of drunkards, and the personnel of enforcement. And no matter how long Prohibition continues to be the regime of the country, its institutional equipment will be at the [p.22] end exactly what it was in the beginning, a body of officials sniffing for alcohol and armed with the right to prosecute under the criminal law.

When the Wet tells the Dry, “It is none of your business what I eat or drink,” he is pointing to a fact of fundamental importance in the solution of the liquor problem (though for reasons which he may not intend). He means to imply that the Dry regime violates his rights, and this is important from the individual standpoint. From the social standpoint the observation is equally significant in another way, for it means that the Prohibition regime does not give the Dry any rights that will be injured if the Wet drinks liquor. Since the Dry does not obtain a vested interest that makes it his business what his neighbor eats or drinks, the liquor reform tends to be unstable. Men feel that they have an interest in the punishment of robbers and murderers, because they fear that they may sometime be robbed or murdered. But they have not the same kind of interest in seeing bootleggers punished, because [p.23] they are not injured by another man’s liquor purchase. In the absence of any deeply committed interest in the other man’s diet, the motive force to drive the Prohibition machine must be sought elsewhere.

Contrast, from this standpoint, the liquor question and the question of capital and labor. In trying to solve the intricate problems of the relation of employer to employee one can count on the existence of stable and well-recognized interests on both sides. The employer does not say to the employee, “It’s none of your business what I pay you,” nor does the workman say to the boss, “It’s none of your business what work I do.” But the problem of liquor control, when formulated as the Prohibition issue, must depend on the unstable forces of humanitarianism, intolerance, fanaticism and sentimentality, which live best in an atmosphere of perpetual agitation. They are powerful forces, as the history of the whole movement shows only too clearly, but they are not stabilizing forces unless they can succeed in estab[p.24]lishing some institution which will perpetuate itself without them. Had the motives in the experiment been less noble they might have been more effective.

There are indeed certain relationships within which it does become “the business” of one person what the other may eat or drink. Wives accept this responsibility towards their husbands and children. The food and drink and morale of the family are a part of their immediate concern. Some parents believe that their children will form the most desirable character if they are never exposed to liquor; some wives have drunkard husbands in whose interest they demand that all opportunities to drink be closed. These wives and parents are the persons in whose names the most effective liquor agitation is maintained. No one knows just how numerous they are. The spokesmen of certain Prohibitionist organizations sometimes imply that the entire female population of the United States lives in fear that every husband or child would be a drunkard if given the chance. [p.25] If this were true, there would be a much more effective power harnessed to the machinery of Prohibition than is now manifest.

These people who have an immediate personal interest in the maintenance of the Dry regime, whether they are many or few, are the stuff of which irreconcilables are made. Though the success of enforcement will dull the edge of their interest, their sense of grievance will become active again as soon as the Wet attitude begins to prevail in legislation and administration. There are irrepressible Drys just as there are irrepressible Wets. Because of them a victory of the Wets would result in no greater stability than a victory of the Drys.

The history of liquor legislation, not only in America but in other countries as well, confirms the prediction which could be made upon the basis of the principles here stated, that when the issue of liquor control is formulated as a Prohibition issue, the policy of the country will tend to move backward and forward between two extremes. [p.26] America passed through one such cycle of Prohibition in the period 1850-1870, and the Scandinavian countries are playing the same game in the same way. Is there no issue from this perpetual round of agitation?

It is part of the philosophy of Prohibition that the final triumph of the cause, the definitive solution of the liquor question, requires that there should come into being an unsullied generation which would regard drinking as a moral perversion and the purveyor of liquor as a felon. Until this attitude becomes so general that those who defend liquor are as rare as those who defend murder, forgery or the use of cocaine, liquor legislation will not have passed through the transition stage, and we are doomed to continue to swing back and forth from one extreme to another. Will ironclad enforcement be likely to produce this generation of hardened total abstainers, and will such a generation, if it should come to be reared, pass on its attitude unchanged to its descendants, like an entailed estate? [p.27]

The present enforcement policies, as newly drafted by Director Woodcock, even if carried out completely, will still be far from the attainment of this ultimate objective. The new Director has announced his plans to the public: there are to be five hundred new agents, daily reports of arrests, schools for Prohibition officers, a division of research, a policy of courtesy toward the public, restraint in the use of firearms, and a concentration of effort upon big commercial violators. “I will not have our agencies following the course of least resistance and wasting their time upon pitiful picayunish non-commercial cases. I think the Prohibition laws can be successfully enforced against commercial violators. I propose to make that our objective, and not to dissipate our energies in other fields.” These policies have been approved by the Anti-Saloon League and the Methodist Board of Temperance and Morals. But these are not bone-dry policies. Even if they are carried out one hundred per cent, they do not bring into being a race of men uncorrupted by [p.28] wine. To get rid of the commercial violator does not dispose of drinking, nor of the drinkers, appetite.

Let us assume, nevertheless, that this generation of hardened total abstainers is actually reared and that the future is given over to its hands? Can we hope that its attitude will be passed unchanged from generation to generation like an entailed estate?

The cycle of the generations turns quickly, and often it is only necessary for the elders to approve of something in order that the youth come to disdain it. In Europe, the first generation of the nineteenth century despised the French Revolution and all that it had stood for; the next generation adored what its parents abhorred. There is today in the young people who are coming of age a reaction toward decorum and away from the libertinism of the preceding age group which was so notoriously demoralized by the war. A generation of total abstainers, if it were produced, would not automatically transmit its trait to those who [p.29] would come after it. On the contrary, it would be quite likely to see its offspring evince a strange curiosity to know liquor as an experience rather than as a legend. The Dry regime would have enough stability to perpetuate itself only under conditions of life – such as those obtaining on farms and in villages – where the young people are under the effective supervision of their elders. The trend of American population toward great cities is making this situation the exception rather than the rule. Consequently we cannot reasonably hope that Prohibition, once made effective, would continue without agitation as a permanent and definitive regime.

A generation brought to maturity without having been given the opportunity to drink will have been denied the equally important opportunity of refusing to drink. It will harbor no grievance against the liquor industry; it will have only the vaguest ideas of what must have been meant by the saloon evil; it will be slow to participate in the belief, in which its parents were indoctrinated, [p.30] that a millennial perfection will pervade society when liquor is effectively banned. It will be much less rigidly steeled against temptation than were the thousands upon thousands of good Methodists and Baptists who changed their ideas about wine while fighting for democracy in France. It will be as easily subject to “demoralization” by exposure to liquor as were the savages to whom the traders brought the gift of fire water.

Nor will it be possible to keep this generation of innocents from temptation, no matter how effectively we police the cellars of the country. To imagine that these young people can be kept in complete and blissful ignorance is to forget the constantly increasing intercourse between America and the other parts of the world, and to believe that the whole nation can return to the provinciality of thirty years ago. Nearly half a million Americans went abroad in 1929; the number increases yearly, and the organization of American economy as regards shipping and export trade is dependent upon this mass pilgrim[p.31]age. The maintenance of our position in world affairs requires a generation of men familiar with the world. Our floating universities and travelling fellowships testify that our cultural growth, no less than our economic order, demands these foreign contacts. We cannot expect these Americans who go abroad to believe that drinking as they will know it in Europe is a sin.¹ The more effectively they see Prohibition laws enforced in America, the more illogical and unsound these laws will appear to them. While the prisons are converting people to Prohibition, the steamships will be converting them to the opposite view. Conversion by foreign travel will be especially frequent among the very class of citizens who are most influential. Even a few of them would be able to maintain agitation. But they will be many, and their voices will be joined with those of the [p.32] unconverted who have remained at home. The definitive solution of the liquor question by Prohibition will then require, not only enforcement in America, but the imposition of the regime on the rest of the world, or the placing of heavy restrictions upon traveling abroad.

At this point a permanent Prohibition settlement becomes fantasy. The Communists demand that their system be extended to the whole world in order that it succeed in one place; the Tokugawa Shogunate sealed up the nation from contact with the rest of the world in order to protect it from the dangers of Christianity; the Tsin Emperors of China ordered the burning of all the books in the realm in order that memory of things contrary to their policies should be extinguished. Such measures as these would be required of a Prohibition enforcement policy that would permanently protect itself from a relapse, or from disturbing agitation. [p.33]