H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/January 24, 1921
I.
So far as I can make out, the net effects of a year of prohibition by constitutional amendment are these:
1. All decent varieties of potent beverages have become three or four times as expensive as they used to be, and in consequence poor men are no longer able to drink them. But well-to-do men still obtain them without difficulty and drink quite as much as ever.
2. The custom of drinking in restaurants, with or without meals, has been pretty well broken up. It is now expensive, troublesome and, unless the proprietor has bought protection, dangerous. If one entertains a woman she is apt to be scared half to death by a raid. The old Gemütlichkeit is gone.
3. Dining out in private, save with the rich, is no longer charming. If drinks are served, one hesitates to gullet them freely. If they are not served, one wishes one’s host were in hell.
4. The manufacture of home-brews, both malty and vinous, has reached colossal proportions. About 40 per cent. of the beers and ales are drinkable, and perhaps 5 per cent. of the wines. The hard liquors, in the main, are garbage.
As a bachelor of discreet habits, well past the age of frivolity, I add a corollary, conveniently setting it apart from my other findings, that the editor of the Abendblatt may claw it out if he thinks it is too fresh. To wit:
5. With drinking made gloomy in saloons, clubs and hotels, there is a great deal more of it at the domestic hearth, particularly in New York, which I know in late years better than I know Baltimore. The resultant jinks of the post-adolescent fair are often such as to make a High Church Presbyterian lift his eyebrows and emit a low, sneaky whistle.
Such are the net boons and usufructs of the Wesleyan millennium. Drinking is more expensive than it used to be and more troublesome, and hence less charming. The poor suffer most; the rich least. No one who wants a drink and can pay for it has to go without. With the high prices current, the bootleggers are making a great deal of money, and the more intelligent and reliable of them share it fairly with the Polizei. Those who try to hog it all are raided, and deserve it. Justice is eternal and must prevail.
II.
I hear much gabble about underground plans to upset the Volstead Act and even to claw the amendment out of the Constitution. I belong, in fact, to an association pledged to these high objects and note many eminent names on the roster. But in the privacy of my vestry-room I find myself inclining toward the notion that all much schemes are tosh—in brief, that they will never work. What their proponents always overlook is (a) the dishonesty and poltroonery of Congressmen, legislators and other such scoundrels, and (b) the strong tendency of the Boobus Americanus, or neo-Neanderthal man, to make a virtue of his necessities. Whisky is becoming too expensive for him, and so he is virtuously against it. This fact is making more Prohibitionists than all the frenzied eloquence of MM. Crabbe, Anderson and company. Anderson, in fact, is immeasurably stronger on psychology than he is on logic. He is one of the keenest boob-thumpers extant. He predicted that prohibition would make Prohibitionists, and he was right. The low-brow hates whatever he can’t have himself. Moreover, he is finding his home-brew to be cheaper than his old rice-beer used to be.
As for the law-makers, I have often discoursed in this place upon the cowardice and general baseness of the entire fraternity. The whole prohibition campaign was based upon the assumption that the average legislator was timorous, dishonest and wholly without principle. It was a perfectly sound assumption then, and it remains true today. So long as the Antisaloon League maintains its organization it will be able to dragoon Congress into doing anything it wants. Far from pulling the teeth of the Volstead Act, the next House and Senate will probably put new and much sharper teeth into it. If they do not, then it will be because the Antisaloon League has resolved to go slowly, not because Congressmen have began to acquire self-respect. Nine times out of ten the very act of becoming a Congressman involves a heroic and complete sacrifice of self-respect. The survivor of that auto-da-fé is ordinarily indistinguishable, by all standards of dignity and honor, from a cockroach.
III.
But why not organize a strong Anti-Antisaloon League, and so bombard the learned vermin from the other quarter? The difficulties in the way are obvious and to me, at all events, they seem insuperable. The brewers, who are kept alive by the near-beer business, and the distillers, who yet live in hope, would inevitably horn into the organization and straightway it would be burdened with all their old crimes and imbecilities. And it would be impossible, without their aid, to finance the fight, at least on a scale commensurate with the financing of the prohibitionists, for the latter would have the moral offensive, and their gaudy accusations would scare off all rich men save a few hard-boiled old fellows with neither tender hides nor grown-up daughters. The average American, particularly the average rich American, is far too timid a fellow to stand up against such attacks as the Prohibitionists know so well how to make. It was practically impossible to get recruits for an anti-prohibition camorra in the days before prohibition had a constitutional amendment behind it. Today it is a mere dream.
In brief, the Prohibitionists capitalize the cowardice of their opponents, both legislative and lay. This amazing and almost unanimous cowardice—this strange fear of being ill-regarded by multitudes of stupid and anonymous men—this skittish disinclination to voice an idea that is offensive to curve-greasers, yokels and admirers of newspaper comics—this is, and has been for a generation past, the chief hallmark of the normal Americano. It sets him off sharply from the men of all other races; its psychological springs I hope to unearth and display upon some fairer day. Suffice it for the present to say that it offers, in the long run, a way out—an avenue of approach to the citadel of prohibition and of all other such crazes of the inferior. Not a way paved with propaganda, appeals to the midriff, idiotic sensations, nonsensical evidences, sly booing and bugabooing of Congressional swine, the whole outfit of Antisaloon League tricks and dodges. Nay, a way shod with harsher, more brittle metal—a way hard to tread, but still treadable.
IV.
But it would be a pity to let out the secret too soon. Give me a week or two to consult my spiritual advisers and solicitors. I’ll tell you what it is anon.
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