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I keep saying here that I won’t write about politics because I’m not in
touch with any politicians. All the people who write on the subject do socialize
with them and do pick up information from the horse’s mouth, while people like
me only read about the game. Sometimes, though, something you read sets off
a train of thought that makes you give up resolutions in favor of conclusions,
which you then commit to paper, as I’m doing now.
In my case the trigger point came when Ann Coulter, in paying her respects to
the Kennedy family, mentioned Joseph P. Kennedy as a “bootlegger”. Most
political writers follow the sharpshooter or sniper model and take a limited
number of potshots at their targets in each of their articles. Miss Coulter does
things another way. Her model is the artillery barrage and she lays one down
in every article. She makes the fur fly and she riddles her targets. It has
made her very popular and successful, but some of us find it a bit wearing. It
’s possible to read her rapid-fire stuff and miss some of the epithets, but I
didn’t miss this one. I’d seen it before
That doesn’t mean I believed it. The only evidence for it that I knew of was
the story in one of Kennedy’s biographies that when Prohibition was repealed
in December 1933 he had a ship standing by in Britain that left immediately
for America with a full cargo of House of Lords Scotch. That of course was not
bootlegging. It was a perfectly legal transaction and in the opinion of a
lot of thirsty people, a highly meritorious one. But it seems to have given
rise to the legend of Kennedy the bootlegger.
That story was not believed at the time -- President Roosevelt appointed
him first chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission and then Ambassador to
Great Britain -- and there seems to be no reason to believe it now. Besides
that, just what is so terrible about a man being a bootlegger anyway? I
thought Ann Coulter was a libertarian, a person who believed in the least possible
amount of regulation of private conduct by the government. Prohibition, the
law that produced the bootleggers, was the greatest invasion of the right of
privacy ever committed by an American government. Its provisions made
lawbreakers of millions of Americans who continued to exercise their right to drink
alcohol, and also of the thousands of Americans who supplied the alcohol for
them to drink, the so-called “bootleggers”. They got arrested sometimes, the
drinkers didn’t usually. But why was one more guilty than the other? Basically
they both did the same thing -- engaged in the illegal possession of
alcohol.
What a terrible crime. Millions of people doing it, too. So maybe it wasn’t
such an awful crime after all. That was certainly the position of the
enforcement agents who went unanimously on the take almost as soon as they were
sworn in. It was just too hard for them to find anyone who really wanted the law
enforced. Some politicians claimed they did, but they were likely to make
these declarations while holding a drink in their hand. It was said that they
voted dry, but drank wet.
In this atmosphere it wasn’t possible to hold bootleggers, or “booticians”,
as H.L. Mencken named them, in the kind of low regard that Miss Coulter seems
to. Some of them were gangsters of course, but many of them were citizens of
high respectability, and all of them were seen as public benefactors supplying
a long felt want. Many of them, such as Toots Shor, Jack Kriendler of ‘21’,
and Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club, ‘went legit’ as soon as booze
did, and prospered, becoming pillars of the community.
The Prohibition story is an illustration of the way in which political
parties change with time and find themselves sometimes trampling on the banners they
used to march under while waving the ones they used to rip up. Politics
itself doesn’t change, but the players do. For instance in the 20’s people
bewailed the way Prohibition had been put over on the country by sneak tactics, in
the same way as they claim the Roe v. Wade decision was made in our time.
Prohibition had been finally enacted in January of 1919, while 1,000,000 men were
still with our army in France and unable to be heard by the state
legislatures which voted for the Amendment. With the men around, a lot of women would
have been persuaded to support them and the legislatures would have tabled it .
With Prohibition the Republicans got themselves identified with repressive
legislation that was often enforced arbitrarily and unfairly, although usually
so corruptly that its worst consequences could often be evaded This was little
enough to be thankful for. The Prohibition Act bore the name of a Republican
Congressman, Andrew J. Volstead, from the Christian state of Minnesota.
Three Republican presidents, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, had to live with the
law and its consequences. The first two escaped them, Harding by dying in
office, Coolidge by turning a blind eye to its non-enforcement, but Hoover caught
the brunt of the opposition, which had risen to a new height by the time of
his try for re-election. He stuck to his guns and went down with the ship.
Mencken was certain that his loyalty to Prohibition caused his defeat in 1932,
but he had a fixation on the subject. Most people thought the Depression beat
Hoover, but at the same time there was no doubt that his dry views hadn’t
helped him.
All this goes to highlight the fact that Anne Coulter is off-base when she
drags up the Kennedy family’s pro-liquor views against them. Republicans and
Democrats have switched places since those days. The Democrats made hay in the
Twenties denouncing Prohibition and standing tall for personal liberty. Their
reward was sixteen years unbroken control of the White House, forty years
control of the House of Representatives, forty--two years of the Senate. They
were the majority party, in spades. Along the way, though, they developed the
urge to overreach themselves and pass laws for the improvement of the people
whether the people wanted them or not. Today, for instance, they are
cheerleaders for anti-tobacco laws, with some Republican help, and only maintain their
libertarian credentials by advocating new rights that no one ever heard of
before, like gay marriage, while trying to suppress fundamental ones like freedom
of religion and speech. No one’s fooled; the Demos today are only a step away
from a new Prohibition regime, while the Republicans for now anyway, stand in
the gap for personal freedom.
This is a lot of heavy argumentation to hang on a single offhand remark by a
writer who’s usually on the same track as myself, but maybe I have a thing
about Prohibition and loose talk about those who fought against it and did
something about it. I happen to know that some bathtub beer (not gin) was made at a
location not a hundred miles removed from my house, and if Joe Kennedy or any
other freedom fighter was engaged in similar activities, then who are we to
condemn him at this late date? Does that mean that I consider Al Capone to
have been a better friend of civil liberties than, say, Andrew J. Volstead? Well…
a case could be made.
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