ONE hears a great deal about the way the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment were “put over” on the American people. It is true, as I have said, that the legislation came upon us suddenly; but everything was done in a perfectly legal and orderly manner. The people did not realize how far the Anti-Saloon League, and kindred organizations, had gone in their work. Also, deny it as they will, the advocates of Prohibition used the War as an excuse, as a cloak for their propaganda. It was perfectly right for the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to forbid the sale of liquor to our men in uniform after we got into the conflict. We were at War; and it would have been as foolish for our boys to get drunk as it would be for an actor to go on the stage intoxicated. Moreover, in the heroic glamour of those now happily vanished days, it was so easy for soldiers and sailors to be “entertained” by any and everyone. Better, then, to clamp the lid on tightly. It was a time for efficiency; and no one is so foolish as to contend that the consumption of whiskey in large doses makes for a hardier race.27 One believes, with St. Paul, in “moderation in all things.” Youth, in a period of stress, needs direction, just as children do. Having arrived at an age of reason, man should be permitted to go his own way. But just as we needed discipline in the ranks—physical discipline—we needed spiritual discipline in wartime. There can be no real argument about this, I think.  
But even here we failed, partly. Liquor was sold to men in uniform. And men in uniform wanted it, and found many ways to obtain it. The forbidden apple is always the sweetest; and the more we restrict and preach and restrain, the more eager certain natures will always be to achieve the very thing we decry and withhold.
The war, of course, was responsible for many upheavals. We could not enter such a fiery conflict without feeling its bitter after effects, any more than one can drink immoderately and not feel ill the next morning. That we fought to make a weary world safe for democracy is now nothing but a joke—a Gilbert and Sullivan joke worthy of a deathless lyric. Indeed, a short time ago, had a librettist put into a comic opera some of the happenings between 1914 and 1918—only some of them, mind you—his book would have been hissed off the stage.
There are some things that are true to life, but not true to fiction. For instance, think of the irony of our boys being sent across the seas to shoot guns at the Prussians and begging them to free themselves28 from an autocratic Kaiser, and, during their necessary absence, being deprived of a glass of beer when they came back home.
It would be the most laughable farce comedy were it not the deepest tragedy. I can conceive of a brilliant first act, wherein some doughboys, parched and thirsty, arrive in a German village and for the first time in their lives taste real Münchner beer—the beer of their enemy—learn to like it, decently enough, get the recipe, and decide to take back to their home town the one good and harmless thing the enemy country gave them. Then, as a climax, they arrive, wounded and depressed, a tatterdemalion battalion, glad that the filthy war is over and done, and ready now to drop back into calm, blissful citizenship, with their young wives and families.
But no, say a delegation of legislators on the pier (a charming comic chorus this!), with palms extended upright,
“You are all wrong, bo,
And you really ought to know,
That we’ve rearranged the show,
And it’s bone-dry you will go,
And though honors we bestow,
Now, alas! no beer will flow!
For we’ve put one over on you—
Pro-hi-bi-tion!”
(Curtain, amid general consternation.)
Now, if a libretto with this plot development had been offered to a Broadway manager six years ago,29 it would have been turned down at once as impossible. I can see the first reader’s report:
“A great deal of whimsical imagination is shown by the author; but the American people are very sensible, and even Barrie and Gilbert could not be allowed to take such liberties with life as it is. Isn’t it too bad that writers do not know the public better? What a pity it is that they cannot evolve plots that will be a revelation of life as it is, not as it might be in a mad, whirligig world of fancy? This is not good, even as satire, for the situation could not exist, even in a realm of dreams.”
But see what has happened! This plot would have proved a prophecy and made several fortunes for the author and the manager.
“What!” I hear some character saying in the course of the first act, just before the curtain descends, “do you mean to say that the boys who fought for this democracy stuff had no voice in the passing of the law that made it a crime to sip a glass of good beer?” And the answer would be, “Of course not! How behind the times you are! America is a free country, you know. The people who dwell in it boast of their superiority of intellect, and rejoice in their form of self-government—though they abrogate their votes to a pack of politicians who are—well, to put it bluntly, dishonest. For they drink themselves, while they bow to lobbyists who don’t believe in drink—for the other fellow. America, my good sir, is the land of the spree no longer; it is the home of the grave.” (Business of laughter.30 Solemn music is heard, and the entire chorus of legislators pass with stately steps to the Capitol, dressed in heavy mourning.)
But nothing is being done about anything. The American people, whipped into obedience, as Prussians were never whipped, take their medicine (from which all but one-half of one per cent of alcohol has been extracted—and why this modicum should be permitted to remain is only another joker in the whole stupid business) and obey the law.
Only, they don’t. They go out and break it to bits, as I have shown; and our legislators wonder why they have so many bad children on their hands, and isn’t it a strange world, and why is it that folks won’t be good and do as they are told, and what are laws for, anyhow, and this disrespect of the law is awful and must be punished, and someone has got to go to jail, and why is Bolshevism growing when we are all so happy?
Ah! there is the answer in one word! We are not happy—every one is decidedly, unequivocally, wretchedly, miserably, gloomily, stonily, fearfully, terribly unhappy!
And why? Because one has to fight so hard for his fun nowadays. A lot of laws have been passed, and more are threatened, which blast one’s hopes of the simplest kind of good times. These laws are based on a complete misunderstanding of poor old human nature, which needs, every now and then, say what you will, an escape from the dreariness, the31 tedium of life. The harmless diversions which in childhood take the form of playing ball and cricket and tennis experience a metamorphosis as we grow older—a perfectly natural metamorphosis; and we crave just a tinge of excitement after the harsh, unyielding day’s work. Most Americans work hard—there is no doubt of that. Except for a Cause. But, seriously, American business is a strenuous, glorious thing—a delightful game, if you will; but it is also a serious note in the scale of our national consciousness.
We need relaxation after eight or nine hours at a desk; and the lights of a great city are the lure that lead us forth—not to get drunk, God knows, but to get just that fillip the weary body and brain need when an honest day’s work is done.
The people who don’t understand this, and who are trying to rule and run America, are in a class with those who fail to understand the psychology of Coney Island, or any other simple pleasure resort; who are unable to distinguish between a happy sobriety and filthy gutter intoxication; who never heard Stevenson’s line about Shelley, “God, give me the young man with brains enough to make a fool of himself.”
How a glass of light wine or beer is going to hurt a fellow is more than I, for the life of me, can see; and if he takes his wife along, as he usually does, or wishes to do, there is precious little danger that one will ever fall over the terrible precipice of intoxication32 and go down into the bottomless pit of complete disaster.
One might say to the reformers that for the most part our ancestors imbibed a bit; and here we are, thank you, and doing very nicely.
There has never been a particle of evidence presented to prove that teetotalers live longer than moderate drinkers; indeed, one doubts if they live as long. And it is well known that those races which refuse absolutely to drink do not produce anything of importance in the way of art; and surely they contribute nothing to the cause of science. Take the Mohammedans. Name one great artist among them, if you can, known to you and me.
Had Americans been a race of drunkards, I could understand this sudden drastic legislation against booze. But we were far from that. Drink was beautifully taking care of itself. It was infra dig to consume too much; and the young business man who made it a practice to indulge in even one glass of beer at luncheon, lost caste with his employer—yes, and with his fellow workers. He soon discovered the error of his ways, and no longer found it expedient to feel sleepy in the afternoon, when others were alert and thoroughly alive. It was only honest to give to the concern for which he worked the flower of his brain and heart; and so he passed up the casual glass, with little if any reluctance, and joined that great army of temperate men—and women. He did not wish to be left behind in the33 race for glory; and where he had taken, without a qualm, four cocktails before a dinner-party, now he took only one, and sometimes left a drop or two of that in the glass.
I can recall the time, not so many years ago, when everyone drank like a glutton. Country clubs were but excuses for dissipation, locker-rooms were nothing but bars, with waiters running in and out with trays of refreshing drinks. (Alas! they are worse than that now, thanks to our reformers!) But this brief era passed—through the common sense of the people themselves. We did not require legislation to cause us to see whither we were drifting. Out of our own consciousness we knew—all but a few congenital drunkards—that “that way madness lies.” And so we quit, of our own volition, this heavy and stupid drinking. The “society fellow,” worthless from the beginning, was cut out; the man of sterling qualities and action took his place. The “lounge lizard” became a deservedly abhorrent creature, unfit for the companionship of decent men. We came, as I see it—and I have observed American life in many spheres—to a sense of our own foolishness.
Big Business didn’t want the toper. Big Business scorned the young clerk who followed the gay lights along the gay White Way—the fool who sat up all night, taking chorus-girls to lobster palaces. With that alertness for which the American is famed, our young men realized that, to succeed in the realm of business, they would have to turn over a new leaf.
34 And they did it. I ask the reformers to deny this if they can. There has been no menace from drink in this country for many and many a year. We never drank as the English laboring man drinks—or even as the Germans consume beer. We were, as the whole world is aware, a race of moderate drinkers—omitting always those few and necessary exceptions which only serve to prove the rule.
Yet, as a nation, we were indicted, held up to ridicule and scorn. We were told that we could not control our appetites, and so our benevolent Government would control them for us. And this in the face of the fact that we had learned to control them.
I can likewise recall the time, not so long ago, when crowds of children would follow some forlorn drunkard being hauled to the station-house. Even though the corner-saloon continued to flourish long after you and I grew up, how many years is it, I ask anyone, since we have seen this sorry spectacle? And as for seeing a man lying prone in the gutter—that seems a prehistoric incident to me. Yet such incidents ceased long before national Prohibition became an outrageous fact.
Taking care of ourselves, still we had to be taken care of! Ah! in our frenzy to become too pure, let us remember the dangers of benevolent autocracies. The State has one definite function, the Church another. The mingling of Church and State—is not that one of the pitfalls we have long sought to avoid? If the former looks after our souls, the latter should35 be satisfied to see to our bodies—and that would be duty enough.
Let us do a little figuring.
There are, approximately, 110,000,000 people in the United States of America. Of these, let us say that 40,000,000 are men and 40,000,000 women. Of minors there are perhaps 30,000,000 more. Among the last named there would be very little drinking. I imagine that of the male population, a considerable number do not imbibe at all. I would rather err, giving the opposition the benefit of the doubt; and so I will say that 20,000,000 males drink in moderation, and that 10,000,000 females do the same. This gives us, out of a total population of 110,000,000, only 30,000,000 people who care anything at all about liquor. Of that number, how many, do you think, are what might be called immoderate drinkers? Five million? That, it seems to me, would be a fair estimate—more than fair. But let us be generous to a fault.
Of that five million, how many are congenital drunkards? A million? Perhaps; though I doubt that even that number have sunk so low. But let us say that two million have done so.
Then it has become necessary to deprive 30,000,000 people of a simple form of pleasure because 2,000,000 do not know how to manage their souls and bodies. It would be equally ridiculous to put an end to connubial bliss because there are a few libertines in the world.
36 I remember, as a boy, an unjust teacher who kept the whole class in because one pupil whispered—and she could not discover the culprit. I never could understand her perverted sense of justice. We were guilty along with the disloyal little rascal who had violated a rule. We must suffer because he would not declare himself.
But drunkards cannot conceal their wickedness. We know them. We spot them. They are obvious in any community. “The town drunkard” was as well known as the town pump. It has always been on our statutes that intoxication in public constituted a misdemeanor. The penalty for a misdemeanor is arrest, trial, and, if found guilty, imprisonment or the payment of a fine.
Few would get drunk if they knew they would be arrested. We had that law; we failed to enforce it. Hence the present inelastic laws—heaps of them—which only complicate matters, and make public morals no better than they were before.
No better? Worse. For drunkenness is rampant in the land, as it never has been. Prohibition does everything but prohibit. The very thing it sets out to do it fails to do. That is as self-evident as the misery in crowded tenement districts in great cities. There is no denying it. People who never drank before, drink now—in enormous numbers.
Why is this? Because it is perfectly human to wish to do what one is told not to do. You know the story of the woman who, just before leaving the37 house, said solemnly to her children, “Now, my dears, while I am gone do not play with the matches.” When she came back the house was on fire.
All the emphasis having been placed on not drinking, people are thinking of nothing but drinking. Public bars have been transferred to public coat-rooms, and we have the spectacle of numerous “souses” before a banquet, premature roisterers who become so tight that they can hardly get through a course dinner. It is disgraceful, but I fear it will never stop. For impositions breed contempt for all law and order.
Passive content finally breeds active rebellion. Our lawmakers should have the wit, the vision, the common sense to realize that. For a whole nation to be forced to be moral by statute and mandate is so ridiculous that it must make the gods laugh—particularly the goddess Hebe when she brings in the flowing bowl. She must almost spill the contents of her famous cup which she has been carrying these many cycles.
There is always a reaction against enforced goodness—against enforced anything. But no sour-visaged sarsaparilla drinker ever realizes that. He puts over his “reform” and imagines that all is well. He cannot hear the shuffling of feet, the movement of armies in the dim distance. If he does, he mistakes it for applause.
The fact that Americans were taking care of themselves,38 so far as the drink question was concerned, makes the sudden appearance of the fanatics all the more non-understandable. They came upon us with gusto. They are pathological—any doctor will tell you that. And the American people, who believe, I am told, in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, permit themselves to be governed by a pack of pathological cases who, themselves, should be in wards, if not in padded cells.
And they are not content with this initial victory. As the Irishman put it, “If this is Prohibition, why didn’t we have it long ago?” And a visiting Englishman exclaimed, looking our country over, “Prohibition?—When does it start?”
They are going after our tobacco, our golf and motoring on the Sabbath; and they are going to dip into our cellars and rob us of that which we used to keep there, oh, so seldom, but now have in great and wise abundance.
It never occurred to any of us in the old, halcyon days when one could loll on the back platform of a horse-car or trolley with the glorious multitude, and smoke there, to keep a supply of liquor in our homes. If we were giving a dinner, and wished to oil the social wheels just a bit to start the machine going, we may have sent to the corner and bought a bottle of gin and a little vermouth, and perhaps a quart of simple California claret, and let it go at that. No one disgraced himself. It was all very quiet and serene and sane and nice. We hurt no one; we did39 ourselves no injury (any physician will tell you that; he needs whiskey in his practice, if he is the right kind of physician), and a pleasant time was had by all, as the country newspapers say.
But from that undramatic drinking what, because of Mr. Longface, have we leaped to? To the hip-flask, the sly treating in coat-rooms—and other places I need hardly mention—long before dinner begins, so that one may be sure of a sensation which no decent man should care to experience.
A nervous tension is in the air, putting us all back twenty years. I assure the reader that never once in my life did I carry a flask of brandy, even when I was going on a long and dusty and tedious journey; yet my dear mother was as certain that I should take one as that I should wear rubbers when it rained; and I let her believe I did both, for the sake of her peace of mind.
Was my mother a criminal, for her quiet advice? Not then; but she would be considered so now, with Mr. Volstead’s act on the records of my beloved land. Actually, I am a criminal if I take a sip outside my home—in my club, in my travels. If I transport a little of that whimsical stuff of which poets have sung so beautifully and often, I can be dragged to jail—if I am caught. Boo! What a mockery of personal freedom it all is!
I heard a fine citizen say not long ago—a man of wealth and position, a publicist, a man of affairs (I am using the word in its proper sense!), a man who40 loved, very definitely, the great America that used to be—that for the first time in his life he had the despicable thought that he would like to withhold something, if he could, on his income tax. He felt little compunction for the base thought. Why should he hand his hard-earned money over to a Government which deprived him of so much of his personal liberty and held over his head the dire threat of further deprivations?
What was this man getting out of America? he asked me. Just a dull time, to be truthful. He was but one more waffle from the great national waffle-iron. When he wanted diversion he must pack up and fare to other lands, where living is still living, crave a passport, swear that he had paid last year’s tax, produce a receipt he had never received, and promise to pay this year’s, and either not stay away too long or see to it that his lawyer attended to it for him.
Everyone is ticketed, docketed, labeled, put in a card-index. This tabulation of citizens—how we smiled at it when the Prussians carried it to the extremes they did! Poor creatures, we said of them, to stand for such arrant nonsense.
A jolly state of affairs! It makes one feel so loving toward one’s Government, doesn’t it? We are all children, and Uncle Sam is no longer a symbolical old figure, but an avuncular autocrat who goes about, nosing everywhere, almost invading the sanctity of our homes (ah! he may do it yet!) in41 his senseless quest for this and that. But just as Santa Claus could never get down every chimney in the world, one feels certain that Uncle Sam cannot pry into every wine-cellar, and examine, if he had all eternity, every tiny bank balance. Moreover, my friend will not cheat on his income tax. He, at least, is decent.
Let us not delude ourselves that we are living in a democracy any longer. Laws were passed from time to time in the history of our great country, without the people’s vote; but they were laws that served our best interests and did not interfere with our personal liberty. When our rights as citizens were molested, we got up on our hind legs and yelled. “What is this?” we naturally inquired. “Why, it is what has always been done,” came the answer from the bar of injustice. And that was literally true. Only we didn’t know it. “You can’t break the Constitution,” was a further argument. “Once a Federal Amendment, always a Federal Amendment, you know.”
And why, pray? If the good old iron Constitution cannot be tampered with, it is high time that it was. If our forefathers who framed it meant it to be an utterly inelastic document, they didn’t count on the elastic minds of the American people. “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,” said the wise James Russell Lowell once; and nothing is more certain than the fact that the moment has come when the people should be42 heard, and not a handful of legislators, who rushed madly to lay in a stock of wine and spirits when they saw which way the wind was blowing their straws.
It grieved me, as a good American, to hear an Englishman say the other evening before a lot of my fellow-countrymen that his idea of a complete life would be to spend nine months of the year in England as a British citizen and three months in the United States as an American subject. There was much mirth; but somehow I could not laugh and I hope these Constitutional Amendments, coming so thick and fast, are not causing me to lose my sense of humor.
It was a statement in which so much of truth was compressed that I shuddered; and I thought of all the forms of verboten that have lately been foisted upon us. I recalled how, ten years ago, a friend of mine had returned from Germany and told me, laughingly, how the poor subjects of the Kaiser were eternally forbidden to do this and that. It was verboten, verboten, verboten everywhere the eye turned—in the parks, in restaurants, in the galleries, in the theaters—everywhere. Always some petty restriction, some tyrannical interference with the masses. And he said then how contrary to the broad American spirit was this constant stress on “Thou shalt not.” We both smiled over it, and pitied the much-ruled and controlled Germans. “What a glorious land we live in,” we said, in unison,43 lifting our glasses, “and how proud we are of our freedom.”
But could we honestly say that now? Do not let us be hypocrites. Before foreigners, we bravely and loyally uphold our form of Government, because one does not like to cleanse his soiled linen in public or reveal a family quarrel; but deep down in our hearts—I hear it discussed everywhere I go—is a feeling of apprehension; and the everlasting question is being asked, “Whither are we, as a people, being led?”
If the political machinery is being clogged with too many foolish and unnecessary laws that are merely jokers and venemous restrictions, why do we not speak out in meeting, call together groups of citizens, as we are privileged to do under the Constitution (unless another Amendment has been added since this was written), and protest against this extravagant misuse of power?
The reason England has always been such a comfortable country to live in is because of the spirit of constructive criticism that has filtered through the nation. If a Londoner does not like the service on the tram roads, he writes to the Times about it, and the matter is adjusted. He has the backing of all his neighbors—and ten to one they have written, too. But how many Americans, insulted in the subway or by some public servant, will sit down and write a letter of complaint?
We stand meekly like droves of cattle behind44 tapes in motion-picture “palaces,” pressed by eager little ushers endowed with a momentary authority, until released and permitted to fumble our way down dark aisles to such seats as we can find. We allow grand head-waiters to hold us in check when we enter a smart restaurant, not indeed behind tape, but behind a silken cord—which does not mitigate the insult, however; and we humbly beg them to see if they can get us a table—and some of us slip them a greenback to gain their august favor.
We allow ticket speculators to buy up all the best places in our theaters, adding what profit they demand, and say nothing—though there is a statute forbidding such extortion. “Ah, we’re here for a good time, and we don’t care what it costs us,” is the answer of the average visitor to the metropolis when he is asked why he does not protest against such unjust measures. I have known only one rich man to refuse rooms at a fine hotel, simply because he felt it wrong to pay seventeen dollars a day, no matter what his bank balance. It is people like that who help the rest of us to a return to normal conditions. He thinks of someone but himself.
Yet we talk of Prohibition as though we were manfully trying to save the next generation from the perils of drink! We are doing nothing of the sort. We are merely bowing our craven heads to a mandate because we have neither the courage nor the energy to speak loudly against a stupid law foisted45 upon us by an organized minority. Our altruistic purpose is not apparent, for it never existed.
“Ah, but,” someone whispers, “the majority want this and that; so we must give in to them.”
Even so, why should we give in to them? The majority of people prefer flashy, meaningless movies and Pollyanna and Harold Bell Wright and chewing-gum and cheap jewelry and Gopher Prairie and slapstick humor and loud laughter and a crowded beach on Sunday, and hideous neckties and shirts and summer furs, and a hundred and one other things entirely foreign to my desires; why, then, should I walk in their path, jump over the hurdles that the multitude puts in front of me?
Arnold Bennett once said that the classics were kept alive, not by the man in the street, but by the passionate few. He was dead right. In the words of your beloved majority, he said a mouthful. Now, because my neighbor and my neighbor’s neighbor have a weakness for the best-sellers (not the best cellars), and find a robust pleasure in never thinking of anything beyond baseball, I do not see why I should be forced to indulge in a stupid Pollyanna optimism and forget and neglect my Keats and Shakespeare.