CHAPTER IV
TOO MUCH “VERBOTEN”

One hears a great deal about the way the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment were “put over” on the American people. It is true, as I have said, that the legislation came upon us suddenly; but everything was done in a perfectly legal and orderly manner. The people did not realize how far the Anti-Saloon League, and kindred organizations, had gone in their work. Also, deny it as they will, the advocates of Prohibition used the War as an excuse, as a cloak for their propaganda. It was perfectly right for the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to forbid the sale of liquor to our men in uniform after we got into the conflict. We were at War; and it would have been as foolish for our boys to get drunk as it would be for an actor to go on the stage intoxicated. Moreover, in the heroic glamour of those now happily vanished days, it was so easy for soldiers and sailors to be “entertained” by any and everyone. Better, then, to clamp the lid on tightly. It was a time for efficiency; and no one is so foolish as to contend that the consumption of whiskey in large doses makes for a hardier race. One believes, with St. Paul, in “moderation in all things.” Youth, in a period of stress, needs direction, just as children do. Having arrived at an age of reason, man should be permitted to go his own way. But just as we needed discipline in the ranks—physical discipline—we needed spiritual discipline in wartime. There can be no real argument about this, I think.

But even here we failed, partly. Liquor was sold to men in uniform. And men in uniform wanted it, and found many ways to obtain it. The forbidden apple is always the sweetest; and the more we restrict and preach and restrain, the more eager certain natures will always be to achieve the very thing we decry and withhold.

The war, of course, was responsible for many upheavals. We could not enter such a fiery conflict without feeling its bitter after effects, any more than one can drink immoderately and not feel ill the next morning. That we fought to make a weary world safe for democracy is now nothing but a joke—a Gilbert and Sullivan joke worthy of a deathless lyric. Indeed, a short time ago, had a librettist put into a comic opera some of the happenings between 1914 and 1918—only some of them, mind you—his book would have been hissed off the stage.

There are some things that are true to life, but not true to fiction. For instance, think of the irony of our boys being sent across the seas to shoot guns at the Prussians and begging them to free themselves from an autocratic Kaiser, and, during their necessary absence, being deprived of a glass of beer when they came back home.

It would be the most laughable farce comedy were it not the deepest tragedy. I can conceive of a brilliant first act, wherein some doughboys, parched and thirsty, arrive in a German village and for the first time in their lives taste real Münchner beer—the beer of their enemy—learn to like it, decently enough, get the recipe, and decide to take back to their home town the one good and harmless thing the enemy country gave them. Then, as a climax, they arrive, wounded and depressed, a tatterdemalion battalion, glad that the filthy war is over and done, and ready now to drop back into calm, blissful citizenship, with their young wives and families.

But no, say a delegation of legislators on the pier (a charming comic chorus this!), with palms extended upright,

“You are all wrong, bo,
And you really ought to know,
That we’ve rearranged the show,
And it’s bone-dry you will go,
And though honors we bestow,
Now, alas! no beer will flow!
For we’ve put one over on you—
Pro-hi-bi-tion!”
(Curtain, amid general consternation.)

Now, if a libretto with this plot development had been offered to a Broadway manager six years ago, it would have been turned down at once as impossible. I can see the first reader’s report: