Chapter VI: The Infamous Volstead Act

There are seven Articles in the original Constitution of the United States of America.

There are nineteen Amendments (to date).

The Fifteenth Amendment has never been taken seriously in certain of the Southern States; and the Eighteenth Amendment has caused more dissension than any law ever placed upon our statutes. The Volstead Act, which is but an enforcing act of the Amendment, is highly unpopular. After three years of trying to coerce the people into obeying a mandate in which millions of them do not believe, are we to continue to do so, or are we, sensibly, to wipe it out?

The money consumed by the Government in attempting to have this vicious law obeyed and respected should cause every American to blush. We are gradually--nay, swiftly--getting to a point where practically every citizen will be watched and guarded by another. One’s daily habits will be observed--perhaps by one’s next-door neighbor, or the janitor in one’s basement. There is no telling who is a detective nowadays. And there is no telling who is a bootlegger. Maybe one is the other.

How far away we have wandered from those early principles of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the makers of the Constitution! “O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!” cried Madame Roland; and Bertrand Barère exclaimed, “The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants.”

The Volstead Act is the most tyrannous document a people have ever had thrust upon them. I wonder how many Americans have read it, studied it, pondered over it? I wish we might read the thoughts of all the men who cast their votes for this infamous piece of legislation. I wish we might search their consciences, know of their secret emotions when they assented to its restricting sections.

It would be folly to reproduce the entire document here, with its tangle of legal verbiage, its intricate twists and turns, its complicated sentences which, to the layman, mean so little, but to the law-makers mean so much! Through a thick underbrush of paragraphs the legal mind wanders at will, delightfully and miraculously at home, and finally imagines that it emerges into the sunlight of knowledge and wisdom. Plain folk like you and me find it difficult to follow the gypsy patteran and patter; yet somehow we get the sense of this appalling mass of words--words that seem to have handcuffs attached to them; words that hint of prison cells and donjonkeeps; words that mystify and frighten us. We feel so guilty as we traverse them; and remembering the violations of this sacrosanct paper which we have witnessed since its solemn passage, we marvel at the energy expended to make us all good and holy--citizens, I was going to say; but I think, with the Englishman, subjects would be nearer the truth.

For a high and mighty absolute monarchy never weighed its people down with heavier bonds. No Kaiser-ridden land ever knew more complete and devastating tyranny. The burdens heaped upon the shoulders of the already weary tax-payers so that the “dignity” of this Act may be upheld--ah! few of us ever consider these. We have grown so used to added packs that one more dollar seems to make little difference. But it was the last straw that broke the camel’s back; and who knows how much longer we can stand these accumulating and distressing burdens?