The perils of Repeal

JEFFERSON CHASE

The social need for complete Repeal, and the danger of all half-way measures and current "Beer-for-Revenue" movements

For four years a tidal wave of anti-Prohibition sentiment has been rising. It has swept from their legislative moorings many little bobbing Congressmen and a fleet of stately Senators who were firmly anchored to the dry cause. It has broken over the two major Parties and has inundated the arid countryside as well as the wet sidewalks of New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and other centers of sin. It has flooded the black belt of the South and the parched prairies, the north woods and the western mountains. Now it is rushing in full flood down to the sea of outright Repeal, sapping the legal levees, submerging social landmarks, leaving the Scott McBrides and the Ella Booles perched piteously upon the roof-tops. The flood has come with all the violence of a natural catastrophe. At one moment, the Prohibitionists were busy tending their flocks and counting their votes; the next thing, a large amber wave of 3.05% beer was licking at their heels, while behind it raced the combers of non-sacramental wine, and the tumbling, roaring, spouting billows of whiskey, gin and rum.

Not only were the dry leaders swamped, but the wets themselves—the Crusaders, Sabinites and other secular arms of the Association Against the Eighteenth Amendment —were caught with their Arks still short of the necessary pitch and gopher-wood. Their position would be amusing were it not so dangerous to the country as a whole. They are floundering around in a bog of crosspurposes and microscopic percentages and are, in desperation, adopting the dangerous doctrine that the primary object of Repeal is to assure additional revenue to the Federal Government.

"Beer-for-revenue" is their battle-cry and it has served to indicate to the wobbling drys a moral loop-hole through which they can slip to the popular side of a great social dispute. But it is a perilous slogan and one which ignores the whole cause of the justified popular resentment against Prohibition and which suggests that Repeal may be as dangerous as statutory teetotalism itself, unless those who believe in getting rid of the evils of the Eighteenth Amendment are on their guard.

Now the resentment against Prohibition is based on two main counts. In the first place, the law opposed the habits and traditions of the American people, thereby placing a premium on a wholesale violation of the statute; and in the second place, this wholesale violation induced wholesale graft, crime and corruption, gave to the bootleggers a revenue sufficient to support the government in the luxury to which Wilson had accustomed it, and thereby challenged society with murdergangs on the one hand, and with lawless attempts to enforce the law against unscrupulous and well-organized liquor-rackets, on the other. The revolt against Prohibition is a revolt against the disorderly social conditions which have followed the enactment of an unenforceable law. Unless Repeal deliberately sets itself to deal with these specific defects of alcohol under Prohibition, rather than to devise some new and ideal method of regulating morals, the death of the Eighteenth Amendment will be more tragic than its enactment.

The drinking habits of the American nation are familiar and can be stated briefly. Repeal must take them into consideration. We are a nation of occasional rather than steady drinkers. We tend to get plastered every now and then, rather than get mellow every evening. We like to drink in company rather than alone. We drink for the effect and not the taste. We prefer hard liquor to wine or beer, the spree is one of our national traditions, and thirteen years of bootleg liquor have confirmed us in this attitude. We tend to restrain ourselves when drinking in public, especially in a mixed company with which we are acquainted. When alone or in the company of men, we are apt to drink rapidly, standing up. We don't like to go through any very complicated rigamarole to get a drink, and we don't drink much at home, except when we give cocktail parties.

Any policy of Repeal must fit these facts about the drinking habits of the American people, otherwise it will simply be a brutum fulmen in vacuo. An attempt to abolish the saloon in its modern form—the speakeasy— would be criminally dangerous. An attempt to prescribe segregated or solitary drinking would restore the worst of the evils of the old saloon, when the bar-room was in fact the ante-room to the brothel. The habit of coeducational drinking is a far more effective deterrent to excess and to prostitution, than any number of laws could be. The Federal Government and the several States, rather than trying to forbid the sale of liquor to be consumed on the premises, should encourage the establishment throughout the nation of saloons conducted along the lines of a well-run New York speakeasy. Years of Prohibition experience have shown that a good speakeasy, with non-lethal and moderately priced liquor, where the food is well-cooked and inexpensive, the company congenial and the atmosphere cheerful, suits the American temperament very well. Speakeasies have been teaching the New Yorkers to drink slowly, to drink in the presence of ladies, and to drink sitting down. This is an improvement over the old saloon standards of segregated guzzling, with one foot on the brass rail and barber-shop harmonics, and it should be fostered and expanded. For such institutions, as for our hotels, clubs and homes, the Government should make good liquor available in moderate amounts and at a fair price.' Otherwise, Repeal will be lame from birth.

To tackle the national tendency towards hard liquor and periodic binges, we must avoid the peril of over-confidence in the power of light wines and beer to cure that tired feeling. Accordingly, the government should prohibit nothing, but should encourage the consumption of wine and beer by other means. The old way of accomplishing this is to put high taxes on high-powered spirits and relative low ones on the four-cylinder beverages. That was how England was turned from a nation of eighteenth century gin-drinkers to a nation of twentieth century beer-drinkers. For reasons which will be discussed later, this method won't work well in America. A more practical policy would be to make strong beer and high percentage wine available to the general public in unlimited quantities and at low prices, and to restrict the volume of hard liquor which is sold, by a system of rationing, either through personal permits or through hotel, club and saloon weekly allowances.

Above all, however, the government should not hedge around with official formulae and bureaucratic red tape the conditions under which an individual consumes hard liquor. To give the purchase of intoxicants the cheerless atmosphere of an automobile license bureau or a bargain sale would leave us cold. We would always know of a little place around the corner where we could get the same stuff with half the trouble and at twice the price. In other words, an intelligent conception of Repeal must eliminate "I'm a friend of Joe's" from the national vocabulary. Subsequent legislation may in time gradually modify our drinking habits in the direction of greater social stability and individual self-control, but to attempt to impose at the outset any complicated or unfamiliar system—such as the Bratt system or the Quebec Plan—would be resented and largely ignored.

More important still, the government's liquor policy must strike at the root of the graft, crime and corruption associated with Prohibition. There will always be some moonshining, speakeasies, saloon graft and bootlegging. There was before Prohibition was enacted, and there will be after it is repealed. The important thing is to reduce it to manageable and insignificant proportions. That is why it is dangerous to consider wringing an enormous revenue out of liquor taxes. To consider the revenue as vitally important is contrary to both sound policy and social principle. It will be a pretty sad spectacle if the government of the wealthiest nation in the world contemplates founding its budgetary position on the bottle-nosed bar-fly, the depleted pay envelope and the debauching of the people. That is why "beer-for-revenue" is an idea which is especially dangerous to Repeal.

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For a high tax on liquor or a low percentage on beer will be a direct incentive to bootlegging. The facts are so simple that only a rural Congressman could fail to see them. Here they are: Potable whiskey can be manufactured for about forty cents a gallon. If you clap on it a tax of $6.40 a gallon—as in our present revenue law (enacted during the high prices and easy money of war time)— you enforce a retail price, allowing for profit, of not less than $3.00 a quart for ordinary whiskey. The Canadians have discovered that in practice, with a notoriously law-abiding population, $2.75 a quart is about the upper limit of what can be charged without making organized bootlegging profitable. Today you can buy good bootleg Maryland rye whiskey in Washington for $2.00 a quart, and can mix your own gin from bootleg grain alcohol for about seventy-five cents a quart. Prices for hard liquor under Repeal will have to run pretty close to these quotations or the family bootlegger will keep on doing business at the same old stand. Beer, being bulkier, is easier to control. According to evidence presented to Congress by a representative of the Brewers' Association, it costs about $6.25 to manufacture a barrel of good beer. If you add a $12.00 tax (a figure which has been proposed by the Crusaders), a $3.25 bottling charge, and allow for transport, wholesale and retail profits, you will get beer selling for ten cents a glass, which is not prohibitive and compares favorably with the present Capone quotations. On the other hand, if we desire to encourage beer at the expense of whiskey, it would be wiser to hold the Federal tax down to $5 a barrel, or one cent a glass, which might put five-cent beer back in the hands of the working man. On the basis of $4.00 a gallon on spirits, $5.00 a barrel on beer, and $1.00 a gallon on wine, we could raise a revenue of perhaps a billion dollars, without affording opportunity for profitable competition from the bootleggers.

However, we should remember that even a low tax will not prevent a certain amount of bootlegging. For twenty years the Federal tax on spirits was only $1.10 a gallon, and yet the Revenue officers were fair game for the numerous hillbilly participants in the unquenched Whiskey Rebellion along the Appalachian Highlands. And a Federal tax as low as $1.00 a barrel on beer did not prevent bootleg "suds" and "needle joints" from flourishing in the Bowery.

There is, on the other hand, a sound political reason for keeping liquor taxes low. That is the fact that Prohibition, in practice, has been class legislation enforced against gin-conscious darkies in the Solid South, against workmen generally, and, of course, against the poor. Liquor prices under Prohibition have confined the good liquor to the rich. The motives which put the "noble experiment" across were largely class motives: the desire of the white man that his black tenants or field-hands should not look upon the juniper when it is liquid, the desire of the employer that his workmen should arrive at work sober, the desire of the welfare workers that the poor should not deplete their meager resources by blowing their cash on intoxicants. As it has worked out, the white man in the South, the employer and the social sympathizer, the wealthy and the educated, have been able to drink pretty much as they please, while saying "No! No! Baby mustn't!" to tbeir poorer neighbors. The mass of Americans have suffered sufficiently from the mistakes and mismanagements of the rich and powerful during the last few years, to make a continuation of such a policy very dangerous in our present political tension. Repeal must be fair to everyone and be stripped of the holierthan-thou discriminations of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Even in these days of billion-dollar deficits, we should not attempt to wring an enormous revenue from liquor. Estimates of the Crusaders that forty cents a gallon on beer, $4.00 on spirits and $1.00 on wine would produce a gross revenue of about a billion and a half, should be ignored, as should Secretary Mills estimate that 3.05% beer might bring about $150,000,000 into the Federal Treasury. The purpose of liquor taxes is not to raise money but to regulate the liquor traffic and thereby to promote the welfare of the drinking classes.

For the great political danger in Repeal is that Congress may forget this primary purpose of liquor legislation. Prohibition has failed to control drink in America. If Repeal is based on a similar false conception and proves an equal failure, it will produce gross chaos and political upheaval. If Repeal does not give the American people about what they wrant to drink, the way they want it and at prices which they can afford to pay, it will be a moral catastrophe. If Repeal fails to reduce crime and to make bootlegging unprofitable, it will be worse than useless. And if Repeal perpetuates the vicious notion that what is sauce for the rich is applesauce for the poor, it will perpetuate and intensify dangerous social resentment against the self-interested beneficiaries of a piece of economic class legislation. In other words, the great political danger of Repeal is that Congress will solemnize in another form the scandalous alliance of the Puritan and the Grafter, which has misruled us for thirteen impossible and unpardonable years. Or perhaps, to put it in its true terms, the great peril of Repeal is Congress itself, with its subservience to regional interests and religious lobbies, and its inflated ideas of its own competence to reform an unruly and intensely vital nation. Unless Congress avoids the many pitfalls which surround sane liquor legislation to replace Prohibition, we will find that the principle that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose is true of government as well as alcohol and thereby put an additional premium on the overthrow of our political and economic society.