Autobiography of Charles Clinton Nourse / Prepared for use of Members of the Family

by Charles Clinton Nourse

The Amendment's Meaning

(Iowa State Register, February 7, 1882)

The truth is, and all who have watched the progress of this contest know that it was never intended to make this amendment aim to do more than it was possible to do, namely, to exercise police power in its own state, and not aim to attempt to stop inter-state commerce, nor try and prohibit the use of liquor in other states.

(Appended is a letter from Hon. L. S. Coffin, supporting the Register's view.)

The Amendment's Meaning

(Iowa State Register, February 21, 1882)

We plainly told members of the convention before it met, in order that they might be warned in time, that thousands and thousands of voters were waiting for the true interpretation of the amendment before deciding as to their position toward it—The Register as a paper, among them. When they adjourned, evading and ignoring a question on which probably hung, and still hangs, the fate of the amendment at the polls, we held that the legislature should take some action to ascertain the real meaning of the amendment before ratifying it. This we held could be done by asking the attorney general, the lawyer and adviser of the state, to give his views as to its actual meaning.

These stills, encouraged by the government laws and by the people of Iowa, have begun their manufacture in the state. If Iowa is ever to be anything of a manufacturing state, it can hope to be so mostly, and will be profited mostly by manufactures from its own staple crop. This can go into alcohol, and always be sold, and yet rarely if ever, be used as a beverage. For alcohol is used in thousands of mechanical ways. It is made into varnish by putting gums and resins with it. It is mixed with spirits of turpentine, and makes camphene and burning fluids in endless quantities, used all over South America and Europe. It is made into cologne and other perfumed spirits by flavoring it with different kinds of oil, and all over Europe, when fuel is scarce, it is used in vast quantities for cooking and heating stoves. Millions and millions of gallons of it are used for other mechanical purposes. Very little of it in this form is ever used for a beverage. To say that Iowa corn should be made into this form in Illinois, or in Cincinnati, or New York, or Liverpool, but not in Iowa, is to still leave it to be so converted, and with Iowa bearing the whole loss and reaping none of the gain.

So we say, let us have the amendment's real meaning, so that it may be fully understood by the people, and voted up or down as it shall deserve to be.

As a member of the committee appointed to prepare a bill for the action of the general assembly of 1884, I can say that there was at no time any thought by the majority of that committee of asking any legislation that would prohibit the manufacture of intoxicating liquors for medicinal and mechanical purposes or for export and sale beyond the jurisdiction of our laws. That committee was composed of lawyers who fully understood that any legislation that we could obtain must be based upon the police power of the state to regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors within its jurisdiction. The Utopian idea that the legislature of Iowa could control the use to which intoxicating liquors, manufactured and sold as an article of commerce in the markets of the world, might be applied in another state, I do not think was at all entertained by the members of that committee, save perhaps one of them, Mr. Todhunter. The bill that was prepared by the committee and presented to the legislature was not enacted into a law in the form in which we originally presented it; but house file No. 516½ was reported by the committee as a substitute for that and other bills that had been introduced on the subject and was passed in both the house and the senate in the form in which it came from the committee, and constitutes chapter 143 of the acts of the twentieth general assembly. And it is this law upon which Judge Conrad bases his opinion. That the friends of this law never intended or believed that it would prohibit the manufacture of alcohol in this state for export clearly appears from the record. Pending the vote upon the passage of this bill in the house the friends of the bill indulged in very little speech-making, and Governor Carpenter and Mr. Kerr were the only members who undertook to reply to the assaults of its opponents. The first effort of the opponents of the bill was to try and load it down with amendments and thereby secure its defeat. An amendment was offered by Mr. Bolter, of Harrison, making the bill an absolute prohibition of the manufacture of intoxicating liquors in this state, and this amendment came within one vote of being adopted. The vote stood fifty votes against the amendment and forty-nine for it. The entire fifty members that voted against this amendment of Mr. Bolter, voted for the passage of the bill the next day, while of the forty-nine that voted for Mr. Bolter's amendment nearly all of them voted against the passage of the bill. The Iowa State Register the morning after this vote was taken contained the following leading editorial giving an account of this attempt to kill the bill. I quote from the State Register of February 29, 1884, as follows: