If neither enforcement nor nullification promises to put the liquor question on the shelf, what can be said of the series of proposals for modification of the law now brought forward by the Wets?
The proposals of the Wets fall into the following logical order. First, there is the demand that the liquor policy of the nation be reviewed, the instrument of the reconsideration being usually the referendum or plebiscite. Second, it is proposed that the control of liquor policy be shifted from the national to the state or local authorities. Third, it is urged that the scope of the Prohibition law be altered or definitely interpreted to permit manufacture, but not sale, of fermented [p.56] beverages – that is to say, home brewing. Fourth, it is demanded that the sale as well as the manufacture of beverages be permitted, but under restriction either as to the type of beverage (light wines and beers) or the quality of the dealer (government sale, or sale by private monopoly under government grant).
These measures include, in principle, all the proposals of modification now before the people. Do any of them promise to end the controversy? So much effort is now being spent by the Wets in facing the merely tactical problem of how to accomplish any modification whatsoever, that there is a tendency to ignore the great strategic question of devising a regime which would finally solve the liquor problem for all parties. Are not all of these measures of modification like so many devices for harnessing perpetual motion, so many devices for squaring the circle? Are there any of them which promise to put the liquor question to sleep?
Imagine yourself dictator of America for a [p.57] day. Say that you had power to change any laws in any of the states, that you could repeal, extend or amend any item of Federal legislation, that you could alter the Constitution itself. Tactical difficulties in gaining votes for this or that measure would not exist for you. Could you, with our present budget of liquor-law proposals, put into the law books any scheme that the whole country would so far accept as to be willing to turn its attention to other problems?
1. Referendum. The referendum or plebiscite on Prohibition is, of all these projects, the most non-committal and indecisive. It would determine whether at the moment the majority of the voting population were Wet or Dry. But beyond that it would decide nothing. It is the legislative proposal least compromising to the legislator. It “passes the buck” to the people, but it does not contain the solution of any of the problems of liquor legislation. If it should turn out that a majority of the voters are Dry, the Wets will be deprived of one of their many arguments – the [p.58] argument that Prohibition has been foisted upon the people by a minority. But no one is naive enough to believe that this will reconcile the Wets to the situation in which they find themselves. If, on the other hand, it appears that a majority favors the modification of the law, which of these proposed modifications will answer the needs of the time?
2. Decentralization. To give control of liquor policy to state or local authorities, taking it out of the hands of the Federal Government, would shift the forum of the controversy. But how would it change the issues? States or localities which are substantially unanimous for or against Prohibition could, in theory, enjoy a regime suited to their desires, undisturbed by the raucous voice of agitation. But, as the Literary Digest poll shows, these communities are few indeed. Not one of the forty-eight states is without a substantial minority ready to protest any decision. Only ten states can show even an absolute majority one way or the other – five for enforcement and five [p.59] for repeal. To find those groups in which there is substantial unanimity, one would have to go to the local communities, and even there they would be few enough. But the establishment of a liquor regime on the authority of local communities becomes farcical because of the extreme mobility which the automobile gives to persons and things. In the enforcement of a Prohibition law, the psychological advantages of local option are balanced by technological disadvantages. And from the standpoint of the drinker neither state nor local option can offer him satisfaction if the majority of his state or locality is Dry. It makes no difference to him whether the authority that interferes with his personal habits is the state or the nation. Rather than emigrate from a Dry district he will prefer to agitate, and the prohibitionists will carry on a perpetual campaign to extend their territory by small conquests. The road to political peace does not lie in that direction.
3. Home Brewing. The Volstead Act and many [p.60] of the state Prohibition acts contain provisions which, under administrative interpretation, are held to give protection against prosecution to the man who makes wine or beer for use in his own home. This is one of the most curious points in the present law. The Prohibition administrators declare categorically that they will not interfere with home brewing, even if the product of the brew should have an alcoholic content higher than that which the law defines as intoxicating. No one is quite sure whether or not this administrative interpretation strains the real meaning of the legislation. But at least home brewing lives on sufferance and would be difficult to eradicate. But the policy of permitting manufacture, while condemning sale, is difficult to justify. If drinking is legal, why compel people to confine themselves to the product of the home cellar when large scale production would give them something better and cheaper?
Certainly there can be no expectation that the legalizing of home brew would quiet the agitation. [p.61] Home brew is practically legal at the present moment, and never was the uproar greater than it is today.
4. “Light wines and beers.” Let the experiment be made of legalizing the sale as well as the home manufacture of light wines and beers, either by changing the definition of “intoxicating beverage” or in any other way. Then the question will arise: Why stop with wines and beers? The people who are drinking gin and ginger ale, those who are making cocktails according to their fancy, will see no adequate reason for permitting one drink and banning another. Rum punch often has less alcoholic content than wine. People can get drunk on beer and remain sober on whiskey. And the man who knows the art of drinking could never acknowledge the logic of a law that will deny its sanction to so innocent a liquor as Chartreuse or Benedictine. The plea for “light wines and beers” is a political slogan which does not correspond to the real desires or habits of the Wets, and if the principles of it were enacted into [p.62] law the battle for full freedom would still go on.
5. Government sale. The proposal to permit sale of liquor (whether limited to wines and beers or not) by a public dispensary under government ownership has gained adherents on the very sound ground that it would improve the present situation, and on the very unsound ground that it would work in the United States as well as it works in Canada. The regime would be an improvement over that which obtains at present with respect to the fostering of crime and the quality and price of liquor accessible to the public. But in one respect it would not be an improvement; it would not take the question out of politics, and this for two reasons. We are a more diversified people than the Canadians, and therefore we would have the local-option kind of agitation wherein the Wets would try to extend, and the Drys to restrict, the area covered by the public liquor service. And, more than this, we are not as much as the Canadians a political people. Less than any other people in the world do we [p.63] depend upon our government to do things for us. If we are seeking to accomplish some object of public importance, the last place we go is the government. And our government machine is therefore not kept in good trim. It lacks the discipline necessary to carry on, without corruption or scandal, a large-scale retailing enterprise. If we gave the government a monopoly of toothpaste and set up a chain of public tooth-paste dispensaries, we would put tooth-paste in politics and have a tooth-paste scandal. How then can we expect to take liquor out of politics by putting it in?
There is no guarantee that the alliance of bootlegger and politician would be broken; far greater is the probability that the same personnel in both camps would continue to share the same sources of graft. The bootlegger would become a public servant, and the money now collected by the politicians for protection would then be collected under cover of letting contracts for liquor supply. The superiority of the public dispensary to regu[p.64]lated private enterprise would be questioned by Drys and Wets alike, and the fact that liquor was being retailed by the government would keep the liquor question constantly on the political agenda.
6. Repeal of Prohibition laws. Let us stretch our imaginations further and assume that all legislation against liquor is repealed. A legalized liquor industry returns like Rip Van Winkle from the mountain. How changed is the scene! We cannot know with any certainty how this industry would organize itself, except that of one thing we can be sure: it would not reproduce the organization it had before its excommunication. There has been such a shuffling of American social conditions that the old place is no longer open for it. The new position which women have established for themselves, the chain store method of distribution, the higher wage scales and standards of living, the large-scale method of organizing industry in great units, the new conception of the power of advertising and the importance of nursing the public relations of an industry, the dissolution [p.65] of the attitude toward liquor once built up by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union crusade, would all conspire to make the reproduction of the old situation impossible. The vested interests of the gangsters and bootleggers which are easily capable of protecting themselves against the police and which would rapidly take over a public dispensary system, would be helpless before the onslaught of a liquor industry with responsible leadership and unlimited financial resources. Revolutions such as that which replaced the movie with the talkie are easily accomplished when capital is available, and such a revolution would be expected in liquor selling if it were legalized. We have no way of prophesying whether the standard legalized liquor-selling establishment would look more like a tea room, an Automat, a Child’s Restaurant, a night club or a brothel, but we can be pretty sure that it would be just about as hard to reestablish the old saloon in its old social context as to maintain the corner grocery in its vanishing social functions. [p.66]
We do not know what form a returning liquor industry would take, but we are well justified in assuming that, as long as the Prohibition program continues as a fixed idea in the minds of the groups that have been hereditary Prohibitionists since 1840, the agitation will go on. Though we peer as far as we can into the future of our liquor policies, we see no road that leads us out of the tumult and into a land of peace. Neither enforcement, nor nullification, nor modification, nor repeal, will solve the liquor question so long as Prohibition is taken as the guiding point. [p.67]