and Independent

December 12, 1928

r

HERE

are

other mysteries in prohibition besides the one at which Will Rogers laughed in his ag-line "You could repeal rohibition, if you could count he breaths instead of the balots." That is mysterious nough. It is queer that a eople should vote one way and act another. But then, ou may say, human beings re strange cattle, full of engaging inonsistències, and their behavior under prohibition is no more absurd than their onduct in many other ways. The tranger fact remains that all the inelligent arguments in support of proibition are still valid, although they -ppear to have no longer strength nough to govern conduct. All the facions and interests and moral powers hat once favored the Eighteenth Amendment are still active and domnant in the Nation, yet they can no onger control public opinion sufficiently to enforce the law. It must seem to the drys that the world is bewitched. They not only got a law; they got a Constitutional Amendment that required a two-thirds vote of the States to ratify it; and they find that they have got just nothing.

I know it is stylish to say that the people of the United States never voted for prohibition, but it is not really true. I remember, for example, an interview with a visiting Englishman who was sent to this country, as an emissary of the British Government, some months before the Constitutional Amendment was carried. He had been instructed to discover whether the country was

going dry, and he came to Creel's Committee on Public Information, in Washington, to ask what the committee knew about it. Creel was away, and I was pinch-hitting for him, as an associate chairman, in his absence.

When his caller put the question to me, I was curious to know what interest the British Government had in the matter. He answered: “If you can keep your workingmen sober, our day in England is done. Industrially, you will wipe us off the map." I could only assure him that if he looked at a map of the United States, he would see that the country was practically dry already. So many States had voted for prohibition under the local option laws, that National prohibition was logically

criminating, that the English distillers could not afford to hold their whiskey long enough to age it.

When that inquiring English visitor was asking about prohibition, all the powers-that-be in America were volubly in favor of it. Employers desired it for the very reason that alarmed the British Government; it would keep the American workingman sober, increase his efficiency and add to the country's industrial prosperity. All the business men welcomed it, because they had learned that in the dry States of the West the workingman no longer spent his wages in the saloon; he brought his money home to his wife, who supplied him with home-brew or bootleg at a great saving to him; and their savings. went into bank accounts or building loans or into more food, better clothes, higher rents, radios, pianos, motor cars or what not for the family. With the closing of the saloon, its patrons sought amusement in the theatres, the movingpicture houses, or the local Luna Parks, so that all purveyors of public entertainment supported prohibition.

The labor leaders were ostensibly opposed to it; they cried out against depriving the workingman of his sacred. beer; but, privately, they said: "Prohibition? It can't come too quick for us. If we could keep our people sober, we could turn this country upside down. Trouble is, when our boys have a grievance. they get drunk and forget it. Give us prohibition and we'll show you some labor movement." And the Socialists had the same feeling.

All these were chiefly moved by economic considerations. But the moral forces of the community were even more eager in their advocacy of the law. Alcohol, to the moral reformer, has always been a devil's brew. It releases, among other things, sexual inhibitions. When a man is drunk, his conscious intellect is drugged, and the instinctive animal impulses in his subconscious mind have their own way with him. In our American civilization, the most repressed of subconscious impulses is the sex instinct. To the Puritan, sex is sin, and anything that releases the sexual impulse seems to him to open the door to perdition. For him therefore prohibition was, is and always will be a moral issue. Through him, all the powers of the church, the pulpit and the Sunday school were aroused.

The women were with him. Alcohol was the enemy of their husbands and their sons; and they themselves and their daughters were liable to be its innocent victims. They were especially concerned about the workingman's wife. and children, and they crusaded to protect these also from the Demon Rum; but that this crusade of theirs was largely a projection of their own private fears seems sufficiently indicated by the fact that they worked up no such enthusiasm to save the women and children of the poor from other forms of exploitation to which they themselves were not liable.

HE political reformer was equally pleased to abolish the saloon so as to get it out of politics, where it functioned as the headquarters of the wardheelers, the ballot-box stuffers, the Red Light corruptionists and the general agents of police graft. The Solid South wished to take alcohol away from the negro, for a variety of economic and moral reasons. And so prohibition had the overwhelming support of the churches, the women, the big business men, the bankers, all employers of labor, the political reformers, the socialists, the labor leaders and the tradespeople, behind a massive front of economic, religious and moral sentiment.

the Constitutional Amendment because they see that it cannot be enforced; but it is unenforceable because public opinion is opposed to it; and why is

public opinion opposed to it when these public opinion opposed to it when these powers are still in favor of it, and the economic and religious and moral reasons for upholding it are still so potent? That is the great mystery. Can you imagine any other law that could not be enforced if the churches, the women, the moneyed interests, the business men, the labor leaders, the political and moral reformers and the Solid South were all in favor of it? There never has been such an array of human energy so quickly reduced to such impotent futility. And why? And by what?

obey it. But below these conscious reasons for revolt, both soldier and workingman were evidently suffering with a certain deep resentment against the Government which their patriotic ardor had suppressed during the war.

The soldier had been conscripted, disciplined and marched into the degrading hardships of the most horrible butchery the world has ever known. He came back hating his officers and his Government, for the moment, more than he hated the enemy. His one escape, while in the ranks, had been obtained through alcohol, and he did not. intend to let the stay-at-homes deny it to him now.

The returned soldier and the workingman were first joined by the intellectuals who had hated the patriotic excesses of wartime. Their resentment gave the contempt for prohibition a

their example, the revolt against pre hibition became fashionable, as well a high class.

It was made daring and mischievo by the young, smart and cynical by the rich and sophisticated, hard-boiled by the disillusioned soldier; and the work ingman and the radical made it a conscious fold-way of nature's noblemen In three years, drunkenness—that hid been a disgrace for a century-acquirre a tone of caste. It became honorific, as the sociologists say. The whole state of alcoholic indulgence was changed For generations, by a campaign of preaching and education and industrial pressure and social insistence, temper ance had been established as a badge of respectability and a test of character In a few riotous months, all that work of years was completely undone.

To add to the debacle, by making the manufacture or sale of alcohol a crim the whole business of purveying it wa put into the hands of criminals and sured as tough a hold on life as the and burglary. Instead of being de graded into outlawry, the traffic was st supported by public sympathy that took on the color of romantic exple the racketeers became as picturesque Robin Hoods. Financed by big bes ness, they acquired a vested interest a crime. Their profession is so proft able that they can afford to pay, fe immunity, to the guardians of the law toll that has been estimated r

a

$20,000,000 a day.

The whole thing has become s colossal that the business of evad the Eighteenth Amendment might rated as one of the major industries the Nation. The farmers have pro pered because of it; their grapes f wine have tripled in market value size the law was passed and their apples 2′′ now a profitable crop as raw materi for the distilled cider that is calle "apple-jack." A goodly body of t voters are happy as long as the law not repealed, and the rest are satisfiel as long as it is not enforced.

ow what is really happening? A:

to begin the revolt against prohibit but what is continuing it? Is ther subconscious impulse overcoming all intelligent arguments for prohibi and nullifying them? The psychiatr say there is. And they point to the f of the Eighteenth Amendment as an ject lesson in the uselessness of her to control mankind unless you ară*

tand the subconscious psychology of he animal whom you are trying to ivilize.

To the psychiatrists drunkenness is ot primarily a sin, or a vice, or a social vil or an enemy of efficiency; it is what hey call "an escape." To them, the nebriate is first of all a person who annot face life. The forbidding asects of reality are too much for him. 'he moral demands on him are too reat. He is oppressed with a sense of adequacy, of inferiority. And he scapes that feeling, as the neurotic scapes it, by taking refuge in phansy-but with him, the phantasy is roduced by alcohol.

LCOHOL happens to be the quickest, cheapest and easiest delusive sense of

a

venue to That ower. is why the laborader hates it. His workingman, ppressed with a grievance against his mployer or merely suffering with a eneral feeling of inequality and injusce, instead of joining with his fellows

attack his problem or right his rong, drinks a little alcohol and is mediately transported into a better orld. His inferiority vanishes. He ruts and boasts and dramatizes aginary scenes with his oppressor in hich he "maximates" his ego, as the sychiatrists say, by righting his wrong ith phantasied insults and assaults. e dreams, instead of doing. Or he icks out some proxy for his enemy and ttles with him furiously. Either way, e drains off the emotion that was drivg him to act when he was sober, and e comes out of his intoxication relieved - his pressure of resentment and ther sheepishly mild. As psychiatrists -y, he has "escaped reality" for the me being, dominated it in a dream, nd come back to it more contented.

This mechanism has always been the cret of alcohol's success with the vilized man. It releases the instincwe impulses which civilization requires m to repress; it allows him to blow the pressure of his restrained emoons either in fact or in fancy or by eans of a proxy and it returns him to 5 sober repressions again, relieved.

the civilizations in which alcohol is rbidden, the mind retreats from ality into fatalism and nirvana. Both e Moslem and the Hindu are resigned talists, and they both escape reality denying its existence, retiring into a ilosophic dream and drawing the cur

faced reality with a courageous attack, have always used alcohol to help them. It releases the Puritan to sexual excesses because his sexual impulses are the most tabooed. It produces insolence and pugnacity in those who are suffering with the inadequacies and inferiorities of suppressed egos. In ordinary social life, it overcomes selfconsciousness, makes the shy man brave enough to talk, produces wit from the subconscious, and frees the natural friendliness of the social animal from that protective shell of self-defense in which he armors himself for the competitive activities of his business or his profession. To the neurotic, it is a dangerous drug, simply because it allows him to indulge his natural weakness for phantasying instead of facing any facts.

The trouble is that you cannot cure him of his habit of escaping simply by taking away his easiest means of escape. If you fill up the hole to which a frightened rabbit is accustomed to flee. you still will not make him stand and fight. It is not the hole that betrays him; it is the habit of running. And, to the psychiatrists it is not the drink that is the inebriate's curse, but his habit of fleeing into phantasy. To the psychiatrist, alcohol is not a habitforming drug, any more than the hole in the ground is habit-forming to the rabbit.

S

"it is true that long use may produce degenerative changes," say the psychiatrists, "in gastro-intestinal, nervous, liver, circulatory, genito-urinary, special sense and respiratory systems; but it is also true that the chronic drinker may have none of these."

What makes alcohol habit-forming, according to the psychiatrist, is the memory of the exhilarating release which drink brings. Inhibitions disappear.

The timid becomes brave and the solitary becomes social. This change seems to be a stimulation, and therefore alcohol appears to act as a stimulant. With his return to sobriety, the drunkard is ashamed, and to excuse himself he must now feel that he has a craving—an inheritance, perhaps, and at least an unbreakable habit. By that means, he evades responsibility.

Remove the alcohol, and the craving for release in phantasy takes another form. It may turn to drugs, or it may produce a neurosis. In religious conversion, the dependence on God and the support of co-religionists relieve the neurotic's sense of insufficiency and support him in a phantasy of religious safety, as the psychiatrists say. well-adjusted and self-sufficient man cannot be made into an alcoholic any more than he can be made into a neurotic. To the psychiatrist, the real habit in alcoholism is the habit of needing phantasy escape from reality.

as

an

The

F THIS be true-and the evidence for

I'

INCE this contention is important to all advocates of prohibition, it may be well to explain the psychological it is much more weighty than I can indicate here-then the failure of prohibition is no great matter. And it is no great mystery either. It is no matter, since the inebriates, whom prohibition was especially designed to protect, would have found some substitute for alcohol or they would have broken down in nervous disorders for want of it. And it is no mystery that the subconscious and instinctive need of alcohol should continue in Americans despite all the intelligent and economic reasons for its disuse, because any subconscious impulse in mankind will triumph over any intelligent opposition to it as surely as a stream of running water will finally top the highest dam.

grounds for it. To begin with, the psychiatrists maintain that alcohol is not a true stimulant. Laboratory experiments show that "the muscular curve of work registers a progressive falling of efficiency under alcohol, and the same is true of mental work." Alcohol acts as if it were a stimulant only because it removes the load of conscious inhibitions that impede the flow of instinctive energy. In sickness, for example, it lightens the conscious feeling of dread, and permits the patient to use his residual energy more freely, but the total energy is actually cut down. It acts in the same way on the aged. It is only a stimulant in the sense that unloading a wagon is a stimulant to a tired horse.

The psychiatrists also question whether the use of alcohol causes degenerative changes in brain and body tissues which compel the drinker to continue its use. As to body tissues,

P

ROTESTATIONS against the idea of a naval armament race with the United States show both the sincerity of the desire in Great Britain to avoid the dangers of such a situation and the fear that it may be imminent. On all hands public men are suggesting ways to avoid it.

Lord Lee of Fareham, who was a member of the British delegation to the Washington Conference in 1922, wants the "vexed question of freedom of the seas" submitted to a committee of two statesmen, one American and one Englishman, preferably President-elect Hoover and Prime Minister Baldwin, or Charles Evans Hughes and Lord Balfour, who headed their respective delegations at Washington. He would exclude naval experts as a menace to any agreement.

Prime Minister Baldwin himself admits (in response to an inquiry in the House of Commons) that he is considering a new move with regard to naval limitation, but declines to disclose in what direction it would be.

Viscount Cecil, known around the world as an advocate of disarmament, proposes absolute mathematical equality between the navies of Great Britain and the United States, ton for ton and gun for gun. He also foresees the necessity to come to an understanding with the United States on the question of the right of neutrals to trade with belligerents in a war, subject to accepted international rules of blockade and contraband, instead of insisting on the traditional British assertion of freedom of capture and search.

Meanwhile Representative Britten's suggestion cabled to Prime Minister Baldwin, that a committee of the House of Commons should meet the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives "somewhere in Canada, sometime after March" to argue out the whole problem has interested Government, Parliament, and press. Conservative members of the House, representing the responsible point of view of the Cabinet party, were inclined to be doubtful of the value of the plan, particularly in view of the fact that next summer is to see a general election in Great Britain. Spokesmen of the Labor and Liberal opposition parties welcomed the idea, some of them enthusiastically.

By MALCOLM W. DAVIS

Bureaucratic circles at the Admiralty and the Foreign Office were reserved and a little sarcastic about a scheme to substitute politicians for diplomats and experts in the attempt to solve the naval puzzle, but at the same time disposed to urge that it receive full and serious consideration. They have been belabored enough by Parliament and the press for the failure of the Geneva naval conference and for the mistake of the projected Anglo-French naval accord to be ready to say: "All right, let them try their hands at it and see how well they can do."

NCONVENTIONAL," most of the

"Unewspapers call Mr. Britten's

method of addressing the Prime Minister over the heads of officials of the State Department; but they advocate an endeavor to take advantage of it as an opportunity to display good will and to achieve some progress.

"Mr. Britten has violated heaven knows how many traditions and practices," says the "Evening Star" of London, but adds: "At most he has proposed, in his own light-hearted way, what Lord Lee proposed here the other day-a meeting of men of good will unhampered by the presence of formula-bound experts to solve that which experts themselves have failed to solve.

War revelations have shown us that it was the plain men who won the war while statesmen and generals were hoplessly bogged. If this particular Britten can rule the waves, the plain man will be as willing to cheer him . . . as he is to bow down in respectful astonishment before the diplomatic achievements of Sir Austen Chamberlain or Mr. Kellogg."

Mr. Britten's cablegram was not addressed to Mr. Baldwin as head of the British Government, points out the London correspondent of the influential Liberal "Manchester Guardian," but to him as leader of the majority party in the House of Commons. So it was not as irregular as might at first appear.

Something of the emotions underlying these expressions of British opinion comes to the surface in a letter from the historian, G. Lowes Dickinson, to the "Guardian." Twenty-four hours

before war was declared between England and Germany, he recalls, the l Lord Asquith, Liberal party chief and war-time Prime Minister, declared that it was "unthinkable." Criticizing Prime Minister Baldwin for using th same term in regard to war between Great Britain and the United States, L asserts: "Everyone is thinking furiously" about it. Mr. Baldwin is sincere, be concedes, in saying that Great Brita will not compete with the United States in naval construction; but w the Cabinet and the Admiralty of tw or three years from now take that view when the United States begins to come abreast in cruiser strength? The hope for peace he finds in an "about-face" policy, an agreement with the Unit States on rights at sea during possib League of Nations blockades, and def nite arrangements for settlement of disputes by amicable methods, as i "logical supplement to the Kell treaty."

H

OOVER'S TOUR of South Ameri meanwhile is engrossing the attr tion of Europe, although Great Brita is more concerned with the naval s cussion. A writer in "L'Intransigeant of Paris, whose name the editor with holds, gives warning that the aggressi policy of the United States, Gr Britain, and "other nations" is weak ing the prestige of France through Latin America.

German newspapers think they hear the clatter of dollars against pon sterling, mingled with faint clashing f arms, in the publicity attending Hoover. The liberal "Vossis Zeitung" of Berlin predicts: "To the matter bluntly, there will be a struggle in the near future between the pound and the dollar for supremacy i Latin American economics . . . T. goal is the control of the oil fields all America." And the "Deutsche Agemeine Zeitung" observes: "The re lations of the United States to me Latin American countries were and are not of the best . . . In the rec election campaign. . . the Democrats attacked the party in power on acce of its support of intervention polis in Nicaragua. Now it appears that t newly-elected President wants to that impression through his visit Latin America."