Still to-day, the moral passion of America identifies America, and it is a pity that the world outside, and even part of America herself, should be deceived by the noisy Jazz band exterior by which America seems to choose to signalize herself to the world.
To what extent America has been "cleaned up" has never been divulged to the outside world. The forty thousand are ashamed of it. The others do not travel much and have little means of comparison. It is not only that drunkenness has been eliminated, but vices of other kinds.
"What an extraordinary moral city, compared with Paris or London!" was Wilfrid Ewart's surprised remark to me. And he had been walking Broadway at midnight without remarking a single fille de joie. And in order to make a test of the alleged "wetness" of America, Vachel Lindsay and I made a tour of the old barrooms of New York. The poet was for several years a Y. M. C. A. worker, and he had a round of barrooms, visiting them all regularly, and distributing literature relating to activities other than the consumption of beer. We made a remarkable pilgrimage together.
By every reckoning New York and Chicago are the richest fields for the "boot-legger" that America holds. If you can prove that these are relatively free of liquor you can be sure that the rest of America is very free. What did we find?
In one old bar, one bartender, four or five loungers with pots, and in the back a solitary foreign woman resting her bare arms on a sodden table, waiting for a customer. Every one regarded us suspiciously and nervously. Another bar had been converted into a restaurant; there was a lookout man at the door, and he worked a STOP-GO indicator in the restaurant. When the indicator turned to STOP the customers put their drinks under the table; when it returned to GO they brought it out again. That seemed to us a pretty flagrant case of "wetness." But as Vachel remarked to me—even there all the objectionable aspects of the saloon have been removed. No one objects on moral grounds to people having wine with their meals. It is the filth, the vice, the point of view of the barroom, that America fought and these can never come back.
Five or six large saloons had been converted into shops; sometimes one saloon into three shops, leased for considerable spaces of time and quite lost to drinking. Those bars which remained, shut or selling root beer, seemed to be holding on to valuable sites in the hope that after all there might be a reversal of the Prohibition Law.
But, as Lindsay pointed out, Prohibition is now part of the Constitution; it was adopted by many States prior to 1917, it has been enacted separately by all the States as well as by the Federal Government, and to go back on it it would have to be voted out by a majority of the States of the Union once more—which is unthinkable.
Wilfrid Ewart made many jests at the expense of the Statue of Liberty. All new-come Englishmen do. How can it be a "sweet land of liberty when one's liberty to have a drink is taken away?" is a favorite query.
The true answer to that question is that America, like England, is governed by majority opinions. The majority of American citizens wanted the abolition of the saloon, and they got it.
As regards the advantage of it, I saw New York in 1913 and can compare its huge gin-palaces of that time, the swarms of unfortunate girls going in and out, the police exploitation of them, the night court for women on Sixth Avenue, with cleaned-up New York in 1922. The advantage seems inestimable.