H.L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun/September 1, 1924
I.
On January 16 next, at 12 o’clock P. M., the Eighteenth Amendment will be five years old. What one notices instantly, regarding it judicially, is that all of the prophecies that its proponents made about it when it went into effect have failed to come true. It has not, in point of fact, decreased drunkenness in the Republic; to the contrary, it has greatly increased it. It has not emptied the jails; it has filled them to bulging. It has not delivered the young from the temptation of the saloon; it has exposed them to a temptation ten times worse. Finally, it has not gradually won its way to acceptance; it is violated more widely and more boldly every day.
The Prohibitionists, indeed, seem to recognize these bitter facts at last; for their old arguments are now heard very seldom. Even such romantic fellows as Pastor Crabbe no longer argue that Prohibition tends to diminish crime; if they did the very Sunday-schools would laugh at them. Nor do they argue that it is safeguarding the new generation against the lure of rum; the facts are too plain to everyone. What they now roar from their stumps, sacred and profane, is simply the doctrine that Prohibition must be enforced because it is the law. In other words, what they contend is that there is a mysterious virtue in law per se—that even a law which is obviously dishonest and insane must be obeyed without challenge by all good citizens.
This theory is so absurd that it is astonishing that even fanatics support it. In the present case it is knocked into a cocked hat by the daily practice of their agents, the Prohibition enforcement officers and Federal judges. The former habitually violate Article IV of the Bill of Rights, prohibiting searches without warrants, and the latter habitually violate Articles V and VI, prohibiting the jailing of any citizen on a criminal charge without the consent of grand and petit juries. These articles are violated deliberately: it is thus plain that the agents of the Prohibitionists claim the right to differentiate between laws—to obey some and disobey others. Well, if that right inheres in jobholders, then why shouldn’t it also inhere in respectable citizens?
II.
The answer is to be found in what is daily done by such citizens—that is, in the wholesale violation of the Volstead Act that now goes on, East, West, North and South. I have, for a man who never tries to sell anything, a very wide acquaintance; moreover, that acquaintance has a large spread; it runs from the high dignitaries of church and state down to such lowly fellows as poets and college professors. I have been trying all day to think of one man (or woman) that I know, not a teetotaler before Prohibition, who does not violate the Eighteenth Amendment today, regularly and as a matter of course. I can dredge up no such person. If one appeared in any circle that I know of the phenomenon would cause a sensation, and maybe almost a scandal.
The facts, indeed, quickly blow up the Prohibitionists’ contention that the wets are all scoundrels, and brothers to the pickpockets. If that were true, then it would necessarily follow that the Republic had gone to pot, for it would be impossible to find enough non-scoundrels to run its daily business, or to man its army and navy, or even its courts. The teetotaler, at least on the higher planes, becomes a sort of curiosity; when he is encountered it is assumed at once that be has diabetes or gastritis. His brother, drinking, almost invariably violates the Volstead Act, knowingly and with a glad heart. How many men actually laid in enough liquor to last them five years? Not one in a thousand. The rest simply violate the law.
I believe that such violators tend to increase in number, if only because the visible supply of liquor is now greater than it used to be, and bootlegging is better organized, and prices show a decline. During the first year the average man found it difficult to replenish his stock. He had to go hunting for his bootlegger, and the man he found often looked like a kidnapper, and offered very dubious stuff. Those were prosperous days for the analytical chemists; almost every bottle bought was analyzed. But now, in all the big cities, the business is on a dignified, even lofty plane. One never hears any more of reputable Christians being poisoned—or robbed. The supply is enormous, the quality is excellent and the prices are moderate.
III.
I know no bootleggers in Baltimore, but in New York I am acquainted with a number. They are rapidly taking on a high estate and dignity of well-to-do business men. They have comfortable offices and gigantic stocks; the banks are very polite to them. Some time ago I met one who asked me to autograph such of my books as were in his library; he sent me an excellent bottle of Geisenheimer 1915 for my trouble—somewhat acid, but still a meritorious wine. I lately heard of another who was a stalwart supporter of Bishop Manning in his lamentable differences with the heretical clergy. I am told that the young men of Harvard, who formerly all became bond salesmen, are now casting eyes at the profession. If I had a son, I’d be tempted to let him try his gifts. A life of learning has got me nowhere.
The public simply refuses to look upon such men as criminals. Even that portion of it which does not patronize them somehow takes a friendly view of them. They represent romance, easy money, mystery, all the things that engage the man who must work and doesn’t enjoy it. Who ever heard of a mob pursuing a fugitive bootlegger? The mob always falls upon the Prohibition enforcement officers. Almost daily they have to bawl to the police for aid. Is this a proof that the generality of men, the overwhelming majority of men, are bad citizens—that they approve of crime? If you think so, then snatch a purse and start to run. Or make a row in a streetcar. Or take your wife into a crowd and start to beat her.
Nay, there is no liking for crime to hoi polloi. All one finds, searching into the matter, is a sharp sense of the difference between what is really crime and what is not. It will take more than a constitutional amendment and a horde of blacklegs to convince the plain man that it is a crime for him to wet his whistle when the spirit moves him. He will begin to believe it, perhaps, on the day he is convinced that it is another crime for him to chuck a pretty girl under the chin. Both acts, of course, may conceivably have dreadful consequences, and cause sorrow in the home. But so may voting for Coolidge or playing the viol da gamba.
IV.
How long will the buffoonery last? God alone knows. The yokel on his dunghill is still hot for Prohibition. He believes that it annoys the city man, who has a better time than he has, and so he favors it. So long as disproportionate representation remains the rule in this great free Republic, and one vote in the country is worth five or ten votes in the city, it will be impossible to get rid of the nuisance by legislative means. But legislative relief rapidly becomes a chimera in America, believed in only by fools. There are other still better ways. One is to make a bad law preposterous by violating it systematically and on a large scale. This scheme, I believe, will eventually dispose of Prohibition. It may take a long while, but it will work.
The recurrent campaigns for “law enforcement” need not be taken seriously. They will turn upon and devour themselves. The more solemnly Dr. Coolidge swears to enforce the Volstead Act, to the disregard of all other acts and even of the Bill of Rights, the more abject and dramatic his failure will be, and the more it will become apparent to every man of any sense that the whole “law enforcement” rumble-bumble is farcical—that those who bawl for it the loudest have the least respect for just and workable laws. The Federal judges have already come to grief; their old dignity is gone. Soon or late a President will come to grief—and after that nothing more will be heard about “law enforcement.”
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