Prohibition in the South

PRIOR to last July, there were only three Prohibition states in the Union, — Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota. Since that date, four states have been added to the Prohibition group: Oklahoma, by a provision in the constitution under which she entered the Union, and Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, by legislative enactment.

Prohibitory legislation in the South — for Oklahoma is virtually a southern state — is not a bolt from the blue. It is the culmination of forces which have been for a long time at work. Careful study of existing conditions justifies the conclusion that these forces have by no means spent themselves, but that other southern states are likely to follow the example of Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Mississippi.

The people of the southern states have become accustomed to local prohibition through the working of local-option laws. In Massachusetts and elsewhere in the North the city or town is usually the element in the application of local option. But in the South the county is the unit. Naturally, when the opportunity was given for an expression of local sentiment against the saloon, the rural counties were the first to go “dry.” There the crossroads “doggeries” were doing their most destructive work, and the idea of driving the liquor traffic out of the country districts into the towns was a captivating one. The movement spread rapidly to counties which were partly rural and partly urban in their population. The overwhelming majority against the saloons in the rural districts, coupled with a minority of the city voters, sufficed to make more and more of these counties “dry.”

So it came to pass that, when the legislature of Georgia met in June, 1907, out of the 145 counties in the state, 125 were “dry,” and most of them had been so for years. Repeatedly the attempt had been made in previous legislatures to enact a general prohibitory law. Bills to this end had passed the House only to be blocked by the Senate. The liquor interests were so strongly intrenched in the Senate that they entertained a serene and not unreasonable confidence in their ability to defeat there any extreme temperance legislation. But they forgot to take into account the peculiar system upon which representation is distributed in the Georgia legislature, — a system only a shade less complicated than the Prussian suffrage laws.

The apportionment is not primarily by population, but by counties. In the House each of the six counties having the largest population has three members; each of the twenty-five counties ranging next in population has two members; and each of the remaining counties has one. In the Senate, representation is by districts, and usually three counties, but sometimes four, constitute a district. The legislature is elected biennially. A system of rotation among the counties prevails in the selection of senators. A senator from a certain county is elected to represent his district this year; the turn of that county to be directly represented in the Senate does not come round again for four years. In the instances in which four counties are bunched together to make a district, the turn of that county will not come round again for six years. An exception is made in favor of Fulton County, in which Atlanta, the largest city of the state, is situated. That county is allowed direct representation in the Senate at every other election.

Under such a system, there will be legislatures, of course, in which the cities will have the minimum of representation in the Senate. This is what happened in the legislature which met in June, 1907. Of the fifteen largest cities in the state, only four were directly represented in the Senate. Atlanta, Augusta, Americus, Albany, Rome, and Athens were among the cities left without senators by this rotation system. The prohibitionists were not slow to seize the opportunity. The first bill introduced was the prohibition bill. With an assurance born of the favoring circumstances, the bill was introduced, not in the House, as formerly, but in the Senate. The fight was pushed, and within thirty days the bill was passed and signed by the governor, to take effect January 1, 1908. The vote in the Senate was 34 to 7, and in the House 139 to 39.

The law thus swiftly enacted is one of the most drastic in the history of prohibitory legislation. It forbids absolutely the “manufacture, sale, barter, giving away to induce trade, or keeping or furnishing at public places, or keeping on hand at places of business, of any alcoholic, spirituous, malt or intoxicating liquors, or intoxicating bitters or other drinks which, if drunk to excess, will produce intoxication.” It would seem that the framers of this law had made a thorough study of prohibitory legislation in other states, with the intention of stopping up every loophole which experience elsewhere had disclosed. The usual leniency toward druggists, and toward the use of liquors for supposed medicinal purposes, is absent. Druggists are allowed to keep plain alcohol, but that is all. A physician may not prescribe stimulants, except alcohol, and then only under stringent restrictions. He must fill out a blank stating the exact nature of the ailment and certifying that in his opinion the alcohol is absolutely necessary to relieve or cure the illness. He cannot fill his own prescription, nor can he send it to a drug-store in which he has a financial interest. The prescription must be filled not later than the day after it is dated: it must not call for more than a pint, and it cannot be refilled; and every prescription filled must be recorded at the expense of the druggist filling it, the record being at all times open to public inspection. The alcohol must be delivered directly, either to the person for whom it is prescribed or to the physician writing the prescription.

Severe as this law is, it places no impediment in the way of ordering liquors from outside the state for use in the home. Many of the larger dealers, driven from their saloons in Georgia cities, have established themselves in Chattanooga or Jacksonville or elsewhere, and expect to retain a large part of their trade. Liquors ordered of them may be sent by express and delivered at the residence of the purchaser. A possible loophole in the law, also, is the absence of any specific mention of clubs. After the law was enacted, an effort was made to supply this omission by imposing a tax of ten thousand dollars, upon clubs which maintained “lockers.” This went too far, but a compromise was reached by making the tax five hundred dollars. It is not yet clear, and cannot be until test cases are decided by the courts, whether clubs which pay this tax can venture to dispense liquors to their members. If the courts should rule that a club is either “a public place ” or “a place of business,” it would be impossible either to sell or to give away or to keep on hand in them any intoxicating liquors without being subject to the penalties of the law. In view of this harrowing uncertainty, it is not surprising that most of the club lockers remain locked.

In Alabama, the enactment of a prohibitory law was a greater surprise than in Georgia. The first step toward the restraint of the liquor traffic in that state was the passage by the legislature, years ago, of special acts prohibiting saloons within five miles of certain churches and schoolhouses. Then came a modified form of town local option, under which towns of 5000 or more inhabitants were allowed to choose between saloons run for private profit and dispensaries run by the community, the profits going to public uses. Up to the 1st of January, 1907, of the 67 counties in the state, 22 were “dry” under special acts; 15 had dispensaries; 21 had licensed saloons; and 9 had both dispensaries and saloons. When the legislature met in January, 1907, a county local-option bill was introduced. The opponents of this measure urged as a substitute a bill which would have permitted towns and cities to vote separately, each for itself. The liquor interests, perceiving the futility of opposing all forms of local option, favored the substitute, hoping to prevent the prohibition of the sale of liquor in the cities and larger towns. But the county local-option bill went through the House with only two opposing votes, and was passed by the Senate with only a single dissenter. Encouraged by this overwhelming victory, the temperance elements introduced at once an “antishipping bill.” This bill, which was enacted with only three opposing votes in the Senate and two in the House, forbids any person, firm, or corporation to accept any liquors for shipment, transportation, or delivery into any prohibition district. The soliciting of orders in “dry” districts by liquor drummers is forbidden, and violation of the law carries a penalty of five hundred dollars fine and six months’ imprisonment at hard labor. After this heavy blow, the liquor interests may well have thought that the worst had happened. But the same legislature was re-convened in November, in special session, to consider railway legislation; and it took the bits between its teeth, and enacted a state prohibitory law, to take effect January 1, 1909.

In Alabama, as hitherto in Georgia, a part of the revenue from the liquor traffic is turned over to the school fund; and there was presented at Montgomery, when the prohibition bill was under discussion, the unusual spectacle of a large body of women from Mobile, protesting against its enactment on the ground that the public-school system would be crippled. But the legislature did not heed the protest: and it may be that Alabama, as Georgia already is doing, may find new and more suitable sources of revenue for its schools, to take the place of that lost through prohibitory legislation.

In Oklahoma and in Mississippi, the transition to state prohibition was made easy by the continual extension of the “dry” area under local option. Of the two former territories which constitute the new State of Oklahoma, Indian Territory was wholly “dry” under federal laws aiming at the protection of the Indians, and the Territory of Oklahoma was three-fourths “dry” under the operation of local option. Constitutional prohibition in Oklahoma is as drastic as statutory prohibition in Georgia, in that it prohibits absolutely the manufacture, sale, barter, or giving away of liquors, except under rigid restrictions for medicinal use; and it imposes a jail sentence upon a physician who prescribes liquor for a person not entitled to it. In Mississippi, out of 76 counties in the state, 69 were “dry” under county option, and the sale of liquor was forbidden in about nine-tenths of the area of the state. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the legislature, which assembled in January of this year, took up the question of prohibition as the most urgent matter before it, and by the middle of February enacted a rigid prohibitory law by an overwhelming majority in both houses.

The Mississippi statute resembles that of Georgia, with some points of difference. For one thing, it reduces to a half-pint the amount of alcohol which a physician may prescribe. It makes it unlawful “to manufacture, to sell or barter, or give away to induce trade, or keep for sale or barter, or to be given away to induce trade, any vinous, alcoholic, malt, intoxicating or spirituous liquors or intoxicating bitters or other drinks which, if drunk to excess, will produce intoxication.” But it exempts wine for sacramental purposes, as the Georgia statute does not, and it also permits the making of home-made wine, for domestic or household uses. The law cancels all existing licenses with the end of the present year, and forbids the issue of licenses thereafter. A companion statute, approved by the Governor on the same day, February 19, regulates the disposition of liquors shipped into the state C. O. D., or with a bill of lading attached. The provisions of this statute are unique and ingenious. After such liquors have been delivered to the person addressed, it is made unlawful for any person to remove them more than one hundred feet from the place where the delivery was made. The consumption of the liquors is made a lonely joy, for the receiver is forbidden to sell or to give away any part of them. Nor is it safe for any one to lay in a large store of liquor for his own consumption; for the law makes the mere possession of so much as half a gallon of liquor prima facie evidence of guilt. With its range of influence limited within a radius of one hundred feet, its amount limited to less than a half-gallon, and its consumption restricted to the solitary individual who orders it, the havoc which may be wrought by a consignment of C. O. D liquor is reduced to its lowest terms.

The liquor interests have taken alarm at the outlook, and are starting tardy movements of reform in the hope of averting further disaster. One of their organs candidly remarks that “various forms of viciousness seem to fasten to the liquor traffic with the tenacity of barnacles.” Why have these various forms of viciousness escaped attention hitherto ? Why has the liquor trade as a whole presented a solid front to every movement for their elimination ? It is the old story: —

Just now, the devil is sick; and the remedy which suggests itself to him is the reform of some of his evil ways. The organ already quoted makes this quite clear when it goes on to say: “The reform of the saloon and the elimination of the dive and such like efforts may not head off the wave of prohibition now spreading over this republic, but these steps can certainly help some.” The Wholesale Liquor Dealers’ Association of New York has adopted a resolution urging changes in the laws, “to the end that the retail business may be ultimately conducted by men of recognized character and standing in the community.”

The most significant step is the formation of a “Model License League” by a recent convention of distillers and wholesale dealers at Louisville. This league adopted an address “To the People of the United States and to the Members of the Legislatures of our various States.” This curious document opens with an extenuation of the offenses of the retail dealer, on the ground that the force of competition or the law of self-preservation often persuades him to “do things he condemns at heart, and which do hurt to the opinions, and perchance to the rights of others.” “Why do so many saloon-keepers violate law ? ” the address proceeds to inquire; and it answers, “Because they find it profitable, or else because their competitors practically force them to violate law.” The remedy, it appears, is to make the saloonkeepers easy in their minds by giving them a permanent grip upon their licenses. The first suggestion which this Model License League puts forth to American legislatures is that every outstanding license should be made permanent unless canceled by the vote of a majority of the citizens of a state, county, precinct, or municipality. It is to be transferable, or left as a part of an estate, like any other property. Licenses should be “clear, unambiguous contracts between the state and the individual,” and the utmost penalty for their violation should be cancellation. Finally, legislation is suggested against the sale of liquor to minors, but the penalty is not to fall upon the dealer but upon “any minor over eighteen who represents himself to be of age in order to procure intoxicants.” The address goes on to argue that, with such legislation as this, the saloon-keepers will enforce the provisions, because it vail pay them better to obey law than to violate it; and to preserve so valuable a license from cancellation “the saloon-keeper will be of all men most anxious to run an orderly place, to refuse to sell to minors or inebriates, and to close at the hour named by society.” Elsewhere in the address is the sententious declaration, “If society imposes upon the saloon-keeper, the saloon-keeper will certainly impose upon society.” Perhaps; but to a dispassionate judgment, a time when, in nearly every state in the Union, an increasing disposition is manifest to hit the saloon and to hit it hard, does not seem the best for the making of such a threat.

There is good reason for the panic of the liquor interests. A map of the United States, with prohibition states white, license states black, and states partly “dry” and partly “wet” under local option indicated by shading, discloses a belt of states — a new “black belt”— extending from Montana on the north to the Mexican border, in which temperance legislation has made no headway. In this belt are included Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Outside of this belt, there is no state in the Union in which some form of restrictive legislation is not operative. The patches of white territory, marking areas which are “dry” under local option, are especially numerous in the South; and the prohibition area is growing so fast that a map of 1907, thus marked, is already antiquated. Kentucky is no longer a “Bourbon” state, in this matter of the sale of liquor. Of its 119 counties 94 are entirely “dry,” 21 allow the sale of liquor only in cities, and only four put no restrictions on the traffic. In Tennessee there are only three cities and three towns in which the sale is licensed. In West Virginia, out of 55 counties 33 are “dry;” in Virginia, 46 out of 100, and 26 more are “dry” outside of the cities; in North Carolina, 62 out of 97; in South Carolina, 17 out of 41; in Florida, 34 out of 47; in Arkansas, 58 out of 75; in Texas, 145 out of 243, with 51 others partly “dry;” and in Louisiana, 23 “dry” parishes out of 59.

Nothing can be plainer than that most of these states are headed toward state prohibition. Their movement in that direction is accelerated by the advantage which all accessible statistics prove that “dry” counties have over “wet” as regards the prevalence of crime. Thus in Virginia, the “dry” counties furnish one prisoner in the penitentiary to every 5122 of the population, while the “wet” counties furnish one prisoner to every 2913. In West Virginia, the five wettest counties have 415 convicts; the other 50 counties have only 413. The comparison might be extended indefinitely with similar results.

This year is the “off” year, in the meeting of state legislatures, but next year, when the legislatures of most of the states will be in session, a large amount of restrictive legislation may be looked for. If prohibition is even fairly well enforced in the states which have adopted it, other states will be inclined to follow their example. It is, of course, too early to judge of results; but the first reports from Oklahoma are of a marked falling off in the business of the police courts, and from Georgia of increased steadiness of negro laborers. At Atlanta, last January, there were but 64 cases of drunkenness before the court, as compared with 341 in January, 1907. In January and February, 1907, there were 3074 arrests for all causes; in the corresponding months of the present year only 1538. The first sentence for illegal selling was to twelve months on the chain-gang. There have been several days this year when no prisoner was before the court at Atlanta charged with drunkenness; and on one memorable day, the city jail, for the first time since it was built, was wholly empty. These are facts that will bother the bureau of publicity which the National Brewers’ Association has just established, to prove to the people of the South that “prohibition does not prohibit,”

As was to have been expected, there are some checks to the advance of prohibition. In West Virginia, in February, a proliibition amendment to the constitution, which had passed one branch of the legislature, was defeated in the other. The South Carolina legislature has rejected a prohibitory bill, but by a vote close enough to warrant the hope of different action later. The Mississippi legislature, which adopted statutory prohibition in February, rejected constitutional prohibition, by a close vote, in March. This, however, is not a check. It merely points to a purpose to test the efficacy of the system before embedding it in the fundamental law. The legislature of North Carolina was not quite ready to enact prohibition, but it has submitted the question to a referendum, to be taken April 29.

What is the cause of this drift toward prohibition in the South ? The obvious cause, and the one most often given in explanation, is the presence of the negro. It is said that the vote for prohibition in the South represents exactly the same reasoning which excludes liquor from Indian reservations, shuts it out by international agreement from the islands of the Pacific, and excludes it from great areas in Africa under the British flag; and that, wherever there is an undeveloped race, the reasons for restrictions upon the liquor traffic become convincing. The South, we are told, faces two imperative needs, better labor and less crime, and the closing of the saloon opens the way to meeting these needs. There is force in these statements. Drunkenness unquestionably demoralizes labor and incites to crime. The frightful race riots at Atlanta, which sprang from the dives and were carried to such excesses of unreasoning ferocity by men who were inflamed by drink, may Well enough have been in the minds of the Georgia legislators when they enacted state prohibition.

But the presence of the negro furnishes only a partial explanation of the prohibition movement in the South. It is a noticeable fact that, during the debate in the Georgia legislature upon the pending prohibitory bill, the negro was not once mentioned as a reason for the enactment of prohibition. The fact is that the curse of the drink evil rests upon white as well as black. It retards the highest development of the individual, and the prosperity of the community. The ablest and most far-sighted leaders of Southern opinion have come to the realization of this truth. Habits of personal temperance are more widely diffused than they once were. The South needs for its development capital, and intelligent and diversified labor. It cannot attract either if industry is made irregular and life and property insecure through the multiplication of doggeries and dives. In the South, moreover, as elsewhere in the United States, the saloon interests themselves are largely responsible for the revolt against them, which leads up to these drastic laws. Rapacious, lawless, and cruel, unmindful of the public welfare and of private rights, defiant of restraint and impudently insistent upon their right to do as they please, they have worn out the patience of the public. They have elected and have controlled sheriffs, mayors, aldermen, and legislatures, until the people have awakened to the fact that the short and simple, not to say the only way, to get rid of the saloon in politics is to get rid of the saloon. No explanation of the southern situation is complete that does not recognize this fact.

Does the spread of anti-saloon sentiment all over the country, and of state prohibition in the South, point to a considerable increase of the Prohibition party vote in national politics ? Naturally the party leaders hope for this result, and predict that the prohibition sentiment will grow till by its own momentum Prohibition is established in the Constitution of the United States. But they overlook the fact that there is a great difference between the appeal made to the average man by local or even by state prohibition and that made by national prohibition. The nearer a saloon gets to a voter, the easier it is to arouse him to active efforts for its displacement. A canvass recently made of Boston residential districts in the interest of ward option disclosed men who themselves kept saloons in other parts of the city, who were prepared to vote against saloons in the ward of their residence, for the sake of their children. In towns and cities in which the question of License or No-license comes up under local-option laws, a large part of the Nolicense vote is cast by men who have no extreme temperance views and are not total abstainers. But they perceive that the local saloon injures neighboring property, increases crime, tempts workingmen to indulgence, makes the streets insecure, and menaces the growing boy. So they vote to be rid of it; but they would not vote for state prohibition. Still less would they vote with the Prohibition party at a national election.

Massachusetts furnishes a striking illustration of this principle. It is a state quite as easily moved as most states by moral enthusiasms. Yet, at the presidential election in 1888, the state gave only 8701 votes for the Prohibition candidate. In April, 1889, a prohibition amendment to the state constitution was submitted to the people. The amendment was defeated by a majority of 45,820. Yet the vote cast in favor of state prohibition was 85,242, or almost ten times as large as that given for the third-party ticket at the national election a few months before. In the localoption elections in Massachusetts in 1889, the total No-license vote was 114,550, and there was an actual majority for no-license of 5656, as contrasted with an anti-prohibition majority of 45,820 in April of the same year.

The same conditions, it may be assumed, prevail in the South. As county after county has gone “ dry ” until a large part of a state is under county prohibition, the annoyance occasioned by contiguous “ wet ” counties has increased until the voters are prepared for state prohibition. But the members of southern legislatures who have enacted prohibition are not therefore Prohibitionists, so far as national politics are concerned. They are still, practically all of them, Democrats. About a quarter of a million voters, more or less, North and South, will go on voting in presidential years with the National Prohibition party, whose remedy for the evils of the liquor traffic is the extreme, and, as it appears to most minds, the impracticable one, of prohibiting by an amendment of the Federal Constitution, as public crimes, “ the manufacture, importation, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors; ” but they will not be very largely recruited from the men who have brought about state prohibition in the South.

There are, however, two points at which national legislation will be sought to reinforce the execution of state prohibitory laws. Congress will be asked so to legislate as to prevent the shipment of liquors from “ wet ” states into “ dry ” ones. It wall be demanded that liquor, in whatever form and in whatever packages, shall become subject to the laws of a state as soon as it crosses its boundaries. Bills to this effect are now pending in Congress. The demand is not unreasonable, and it is, incidentally, in full accord with the state-rights sentiment of the South,

In this connection it may be remarked that it was to the vigilance of Senator Clay of Georgia that prohibition states and communities owe the recent discovery of an attempt to open the mails to the shipment of liquors. On the 13th of February, as the Senate reading-clerk was droning through the bill for the revision and codification of the laws of the United States, and section 218, which forbids the transmission of certain articles through the mails, was reached, Senator Clay jumped to his feet and directed the attention of the Senate to the fact that nowhere in the amendment was there any mention of liquor or glass. He protested against the amendment on the ground that it would nullify prohibition laws by allowing liquor dealers to send liquor of all kinds through the mails, and he demanded of the Senator in charge of the bill by whom and for what reason the change had been made. No very definite explanation was given of the origin of the mysterious amendment, but the Senate, by a unanimous vote, struck it out, and the provisions of the original law were restored.

The second demand which is likely to be made upon Congress is for legislation to prevent the issue of “ licenses ” by the federal government for the sale of intoxicating liquors in counties or states where it is forbidden by law. But this demand, although sincere, is based on a misapprehension. The national government does not “ license ” any one to sell liquor. But it exacts an internal-revenue tax from all persons who do sell liquor, and it collects this tax without reference to state license or prohibition laws. The truth is that this system is far from being an unmixed evil in prohibition communities or states. It puts the liquor dealer between the devil and the deep sea. If he attempts to sell without paying the internal-revenue tax, he is liable to prosecution and heavy penalty in the federal courts. But if he pays the tax, the fact that he has done so may be disclosed, and the very possession of the tax receipt which he is required to have in order to stand off the federal authorities may be, and in some states is, made prima facie evidence that he is violating the state law. Level-headed prohibition and antisaloon leaders will reflect seriously before they agitate for a change in this particular.