CATT, Carrie Chapman SPEECH, ARTICLE, BOOK FILE Article: "If Not Prohibition, What?" If Not Prohibition, What? By Carrie Chapman Catt At the moment when the official legality of the Eighteenth Amendment was being announced, on the one hand, certain official heads of the organized and united distillers, brewers, consumers and supporters of the liquor traffic announced, on the other, that violation would begin at once and continue with such unabated flagrancy and scandal that soon the public would rise in protest and demand the repeal of the law. It, therefore, happened that on the day following the establishment of the Amendment a fresh battle began with the same wets on one side, the same drys on the other, who had long been engaged in contest - the wets aiming at repeal, the drys at support of the Amendment. It is curious that this organized threat of insurrection has been so far forgotten and overlooked that throughout the past eleven years every successful violation of the Amendment has been charged to the frailties of the law rather than to the sharp practice of organized lawlessness. In truth, the new battle has been far easier for the wets and harder for the drys than the preceding one. An army of officers and workmen, now unemployed by the close of distilleries, breweries, and saloons, together with a considerable host of criminals, drunkards, prostitutes, drug addicts, and political henchmen, trained by the worst variety of the saloon, composed a ready force from which could be drawn any type of servitor required in the business of organized law nullification. The enforcement of the law did not lie with the drys, but with the Government. An immense staff of enforcing officers was necessary. These were often supplied by party patronage, and were frequently designed to violate rather than to uphold the law. Many men had little sympathy with the law itself, many were incompetent, others were Excerpts from the second article in a series printed in "The Woman's Journal" a monthly magazine published at 171 Madison Avenue, New York City - Every woman citizen should subscribe ($2.50 a year). weak and bribable, and others were in secret connivance with the law rebels. Thus, for eleven years, the United States has muddled along under prohibition. To repeal the amendment now would be a cowardly and ignoble surrender to a minority who, at the beginning announced their intention of compelling such an act. . . . . . No country is trusting itself to free and uncontrolled drink. Each is making some kind of effort by custom or law to restrict the manufacture and the use of alcoholic drink. . . . . . Dealing with liquor control began in this country as soon as the first white man stepped on American soil. . . . Were there an enterprising searcher for facts to tell us how many liquor laws have been passed in colonies, states and nation, since that first one, it would greatly add to our useful knowledge. Glancing over the long record, I should say the number would be over a thousand. Certainly new laws were passed and old laws rescinded in most years. "IF NOT PROHIBITION, WHAT?" Most political parties dodge that question and most candidates for Congress evade it. Yet I want to say with all the force I can muster that it is the only question outstanding in the situation at this moment and that to avoid it is a cowardice unworthy of a self-respecting country. A practical, logical people will insist upon that question being completely answered before the Eighteenth Amendment is dropped out of the Constitution. Every conceivable law and regulation have already been tried in this or other countries and all have been pronounced failures by a large number of citizens of each country. Why should this country discard a law deliberately violated and persistently belittled in order to pick up another law in another country no better respected or enforced than is our prohibition? Why not give our own law one honest chance of enforcement or trial? Miss Tarbell would like to return to local option. Local option never has been a peaceful, satisfactory condition. That, like every other liquor law, has been under continual change. After a generation of experiment a country may have become reconciled to local prohibition. It must be remembered that there is not and never has been any form of liquor regulation satisfactory to drinking people and perhaps there never will be. HIGH LICENSE . . . . . In 1918 high license was at its most glorious peak. A high-power competition in selling was in fullest swing which planted new saloons in every available spot. Respectable saloons there were, but there were more with their back rooms, upper rooms and cellar rooms. Here addicts, prostitutes, gamblers, and the lowest type of politician joined in a common headquarters, and the wicked shamelessness of these lower types was the real cause of the last bound taken by the nation into constitutional prohibition. . . . . . The Amendment can be repealed by the same process that established it. It is a long and tortuous process, yet it can be accomplished; a temporary measure could be substituted while the change was in operation and somehow, somewhere, a new experiment could be devised. But why experiment? Why not stick fast to the Eighteenth Amendment until it is proved or disproved, or get a substitute with all the pieces fitted together and quit this ridiculous side-stepping? Is there a substitute? Certainly no authority with the right to speak has yet proposed one, but an interesting prospect has arisen. Dwight W. Morrow, Candidate for Senator from New Jersey, has an idea. . . . He would repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, then introduce another amendment "which will restore to the states the power to determine their policy toward the liquor traffic and vest in the Federal Government power to give all possible protection and assistance to those states that desire complete prohibition against invasion from the states that do not." . . . . . Mr. Morrow, in rather an indeterminable way, would go backward, but his plan will please few wets and few drys. When he is appointed political leader of letting out one constitutional amendment and letting in another, he will have more trouble than he has yet met. It is difficult to imagine a distiller or brewer making sufficient additional profit in such a scheme to attract him, or any dry finding helpfulness in a prohibition state with bootleggers, spies, and smugglers sitting in a row all the way around on the frontier. If the United States cannot enforce a Federal prohibition amendment now, how can it be expected to protect scattered prohibition states with liquor bases plentifully disposed? What will it do when fleets of airplanes carrying forbidden beverages fly over the frontiers and defy the nation? Why not clean up all the frontiers instead of a few? How queer are men! Many of us see advantages in prohibition that we like. We do not drink nor associate intimately with people who do. We do not serve liquor in our homes and we turn down our glasses on other tables. We are pleased to pass along the street where we see no saloons and smell no rancid liquor issuing from the swinging doors. There are no tippling men who enter our homes and we see no drunken men. We do not discuss prohibition nor the detestable character of the modern social class which finds in the violation of the law the chief charm of life. Whatever the law, we shall live in the same quiet, law-abiding, simple and civilized way. I, for one, shall stand by prohibition as long as it is there, and thousands and thousands of American men and women will so live to the end. WET PROPAGANDA . . . . . In the present situation, I am not disturbed by the irritation and uncertainty the wet propaganda is arousing. It seems in accord with all the history of liquor law-making - whatever is, is wrong. Nor do I find anything upsetting in the fact that some of foreign birth, with little or no education and no American training, may join the half criminal forces engaged in organized violation of the law. What shocks me is the American man or woman who defies a law honestly made in the regular way by a majority of fellow citizens. Drink and drunkenness were not respectable before the Eighteenth Amendment was put in the Constitution and no change of the law can make them so. The ladies joining the drinking forces and organized to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment can never make drink decent nor themselves a moral force. The trend of a thousand years is in the opposite direction and it will continue in that direction. I predict that the United States will stick to prohibition, but I do not say that it may not repeal the Eighteenth Amendment a few times as it passes along its ever-changing way. In the end it will return to the law which has called forth its hardest fight and aims at the highest decency. Copyright by the Woman's Citizen Corporation, printed by permission. This is one of a series of leaflets published by the WOMAN'S NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT, 919 Metropolitan Building, Boston, Mass. Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.