What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 9

Amendment was adopted by Congress and by State
Legislatures, and the overwhelming majorities which it commanded in
those bodies, is no proof either of sincere conviction on the part of the
lawmakers or of their belief that they were expressing the genuine will
of their constituents. As for individual conviction, the personal conduct
of a large proportion of the lawmakers who voted for Prohibition is in
notorious conflict with their votes; and as for the other question, it has
happened in State after State that the Legislature was almost unanimous
for Prohibition when the people of the State had quite recently shown

by their vote that they were either distinctly against it or almost evenly
divided. Of this kind of proceeding, Maryland presented an example so
flagrant as to deserve special mention. Although popular votes in the
State had, within quite a short time, recorded strong anti-Prohibition
majorities, the Legislature rushed its ratification of the Eighteenth
Amendment through in the very first days of its session; and this in
face of the fact that Maryland has always held strongly by State rights
and cherished its State individuality, and that the leading newspapers of
the State and many of its foremost citizens came out courageously and
energetically against the Amendment. In these circumstances, nothing
but a mean subserviency to political intimidation can possibly account
for the indecent haste with which the ratification was pushed through. It
is interesting to note a subsequent episode which casts a further
interesting light on the matter, and tends to show that there are limits
beyond which the whip-and-spur rule of the Anti-Saloon League cannot
go. In the session of the present year, the Anti-Saloon League tried to
get a State Prohibition enforcement bill passed. Although there was a
great public protest, the bill was put through the lower House of the
Legislature; but in the Senate it encountered resistance of an effective
kind. The Senate did not reject the bill; but, in spite of bitter opposition
by the Anti-Saloon League, it attached to the bill a referendum clause.
With that clause attached, the Anti-Saloon League ceased to desire the
passage of the bill, and allowed it to be killed on its return to the lower
House of the Legislature. Is this not a fine exhibition of the nature of
the League's hold on legislation? And is there not abundant evidence
that the whole of this Maryland story is typical of what has been going
on throughout the country? Charges are made that the Anti-Saloon
League has expended vast sums of money in its campaigns; money
largely supplied, it is often alleged, by one of the world's richest men,
running into the tens of millions or higher. r do not believe that these
charges are true. More weight is to be attached to another factor in the
case--the adoption of the Amendment by Congress while we were in
the midst of the excitement and exaltation of the war, and two million
of our young men were overseas. Unquestionably, advantage was taken
of this situation, there can be little doubt that the Eighteenth
Amendment would have had much harder sledding at a normal time.
And it is right, accordingly, to insist that the Amendment was not

subjected to the kind of discussion, nor put through the kind of test of
national approval, which ought to precede any such permanent and
radical change in our Constitutional organization. This is especially
true because National Prohibition was not even remotely an issue in the
preceding election, nor in any earlier one. All these things must weigh
in our judgment of the moral weight to be attached to the adoption of
the Eighteenth Amendment; but there is another aspect of that adoption
which is more important. The gravest reproach which attaches to that
unfortunate act, the one which causes deepest concern among thinking
citizens, does not relate to any incidental feature of the Prohibition
manoevres. The fundamental trouble lay in a deplorable absence of any
general understanding of the seriousness of making a vital change in
the Constitution--incomparably the most vital to which it has ever been
subjected--and of the solemn responsibility of those upon whom rested
the decision to make or not to make that change. Even in newspapers in
which one would expect, as a matter of course, that this aspect of the
question would be earnestly impressed upon their readers, it was, as a
rule, passed over without so much as a mention. And this is not all. One
of the shrewdest and most successful of the devices which the League
and its supporters constantly made use of was to represent the function
of Congress as being merely that of submitting the question to the State
Legislatures; as though the passage of the Amendment by a two-thirds
vote of Congress