Referendums on the Liquor Issue Part 1
November 4, 2009 by Flapper
Filed under Prohibition
IT is perhaps not very logical for the country to be so wrought up over the liquor issue that it thinks of very little else. There are a number of exceedingly important issues which ought now to be under public discussion, and the liquor issue is in a sense acting as a red herring across the trail of these very important matters; but there is no doubt that the people are interested in the liquor question, and the people really make the issues of a campaign, after all.
There is a great deal of loose thinking and loose talking about this question. Although prohibition slowly developed as a sentiment in this country over a long period of years, the final consummation of it came quickly, particularly because of the war feeling, and it came before there had been much formation of public opinion about it in the larger cities of the East, although the rural districts generally had argued about it a long time and had slowly been making up their minds in a multitude of local-option campaigns which took place throughout the land.
THE result of the swiftness with which prohibition finally came has been to offend the honest views of a great many persons and to make enforcement difficult in many parts of the country. Side by side with these facts there is much evidence of the very wholesome effect of the new National policy over large areas and with large numbers of people. The old saloon conditions and the evils of poverty and misery and crime and bad politics that grew out of them are looked back to by millions as if it had been the passing of a pestilence.
Recently the demand has been made in various parts of the country for some means of getting at perhaps the revised will of the people through referendum upon this vexed question. Certain circumstances have lent force to this suggestion. In the first place, the political parties themselves, the Democratic and the Republican, are split wide open on the issue and are impotent to do much. Because the Republican Party is in trouble over this issue in New York State, let no man think that the Democratic Party is not in trouble too. In Washington-that is, Nationally-the Democratic Party is split much more widely than the Republican. It may conceivably turn out that both of them are impotent to effect any revision of the will of the people, if such revision is contemplated by the people.
Now the people have a perfect right to a revision of their will if they wish to make it. And in a democracy, if the reprsentative party system fails them upon a crucial occasion, the people have a perfect right to resort to the method of the referendum in order that their will may be determined. None of us in America is afraid of what the people may desire and vote if they are thoroughly aroused and informed upon the issue.
But it ought to be an honest referendum and a thorough one, which means something and effects something. This referendum must be National in scope, taken by States, because prohibition has become a completely National problem, involved in the National Constitution. it should be taken upon the Eighteenth Amendment itself; either upon the question of repeal or some question of definite change in the Amendment which could be understood by all the people. While the Eighteenth Amendment remains no change in statute, the Volstead Act or any other, is going to be satisfactory to those who are demanding a revision of the National policy upon prohibition. More than this, provision should be made in connection with the referendum for the complete carrying out of the public will when it is Nationally determined. The carrying out of the will of the people should not be left in this instance to the political parties if both of them continue to be paralyzed in the presence of this issue. The likelihood of a third party to carry out the popular will on this issue is not great, in view of the dangers of multi-party government, as our people have witnessed them in Europe since the Great War. Probably we must solve our problem through the two-party system or the referendum.
In the meantime all American citizens should demand the enforcement of the existing Constitution and law. Upon relatively unimportant matters a comparative laxness of enforcement may not be definitely fatal to a country, but widespread defiance of enforcement on a question of paramount importance in the public mind is fraught with real peril to popular institutions. So far as prohibition is concerned, nobody knows whether it can be enforced, because there never has been an adequate enforcement system attempted. Enforcement has been the sport of politics of both parties. General Andrews, the chief enforcement officer of the Nation, has been on the verge of resignation again and again because he has no final responsible power over his own lieutenants. No time should be lost in seeing that he gets such power. Thus far he has pleaded unavailingly for an enforcement unit inside the Treasury Department of which he shall, be master.
The conditions resulting from the present system of enforcement are widely regarded as intolerable and are a matter of deep concern to the people at large. Lawlessness is the most dangerous enemy of republics and directly endangers the welfare of the mass of the people in their homes, their happiness, and their savings. It is impossible for any country to remain permanently half law-abiding and half lawless.
Source: The Outlook, 27 October 1926
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