Twenty-Five Years After Repeal
Only nine months and fifteen days were required for the 48 states to ratify the repeal of the 18th amendment, then known as the Prohibition Amendment. This had been proposed by Congress on February 20, 1933 and the 21st amendment which repealed the 18th amendment was proclaimed adopted December 5, 1933. Thus 20 days before Christmas a mighty sluiceway was opened for the flow of beverage alcohol. Wines, whiskeys, brandies, and other hard liquors were again legally offered for sale. Meanwhile, by Congressional action on request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, beer was permitted to be sold in April, 1933, or eight months prior to the actual repeal of the amendment. The brewing industry moved fast. Within 15 years the breweries in the United States produced 889,068,689 barrels of beer. Since each barrel holds 31 gallons, that meant 27,551,129,359 gallons.
The year 1958 thus brings an ominous 25th anniversary in American life. In this anniversary year a balance sheet of the American liquor situation makes dreadful reading.
Of course it must be acknowledged, and credit must be given where credit is due, that there are a few assets and credits, as well as huge liabilities and debits in this balance sheet.
The credit items are easily recognizable. (1) Repeal of the amendment, with the imposition of license fees, produced new revenue for municipal, state, and the federal governments. Since the year 1933 marked the bottom of the great depression, such additional revenue was heartily welcomed. Today the total number of taverns, saloons, bars, or what-have-you, plus retail stores that sell liquor, exceeds the combined total of churches and schools by nearly 30,000, and the ratio of liquor outlets to American homes across the United States is one liquor store or bar to every 80 American dwelling units. The license fees from these establishments bring in a substantial revenue. Moreover, the real estate taxes on breweries, distilleries, wineries, vineyards, and on the retail outlets, likewise swell the coffers of the local, state and national treasuries. According to John M. Morehouse in The New York Herald Tribune, the drinking of tax-paid alcoholic liquor is now the second largest source of revenue to the Federal Government as well as one of the largest revenue producers for the states.
Moreover, during these 25 years the liquor industry has spent more than 15 billion dollars on farm products, corn, hops, malt, barley, and other grains, and for bottles and tin can containers, and for the construction of new breweries and distilleries. The brewing industry claims that it has appropriated 38 billion dollars for such expenditures and has injected that colossal sum into the American economy. Furthermore, as anybody is aware who reads a newspaper or a magazine or sees a billboard, many millions of dollars are spent each year in advertising. (2) These hundreds of thousands of establishments produce rent income to their landlords who in turn pay state and federal income taxes on the rent received. (3) All these establishments, retail and wholesale, give employment to a substantial number of people. Back in the years of the depression with its millions of unemployed, this new employment was likewise welcomed. Although some 1,200,000 people are thus employed, by comparison with the total labor force in the United States, computed to be about 65 million, the total employed in the liquor traffic is really quite small. In addition, about 400,000 are engaged in the illegal industry known as bootlegging.
Such are the credit items. They are more than offset by the costly, terrifying, tragic debit items. Whatever assets there may be in this alcoholic balance sheet, they become negligible when contrasted with the huge liabilities instantly recognizable by anybody who looks realistically at the American liquor scene today. There are at least eleven such overwhelming, bankruptcy producing debits and liabilities.
(1) The past 25 years have witnessed an immense, indeed incredible increase in the number of people who drink. In a well-documented study, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which naturally has much at stake in the number of deaths directly or indirectly attributable to the consumption of beverage alcohol, states that there are now 65,000,000 people in the United States who drink. That easily approximates over 60 per cent of the adult (over 18 years of age) population. Nothing comparable to this was true 25 years ago.
(2) The past 25 years have witnessed a steadily mounting rise in crime, directly or indirectly due to liquor. There is hardly a city across the land that has not had to increase its forces for the maintenance of law and order to cope with the increase in murders, rapes, burglaries, assaults, and other crimes attributable to the use of liquor. Typical of the high cost of crime due to alcohol is the experience of a certain city in Michigan. In 1950 this city collected in license fees $57,573 from the liquor traffic, whereas expenditures due to crime related to drink totaled $246,000, represented by judicial, police, and jail expenses, relief and welfare to dependent families, aid to neglected children, and industrial loss due to alcoholic absenteeism, a net loss to the city of $188,427.
(3) The dangerous rise in juvenile delinquency is front page news in every town and city. And while today’s feeling of economic and political insecurity, resulting from wars and rumors of wars, is philosophically interpreted as a background for juvenile delinquency, most of it is due to delinquent homes, neglectful parents, unhappy marriages, poverty, and other conditions in which liquor is the factor. Much of it is due directly to the ability of youth to obtain liquor in spite of the legal prohibitions against selling liquor to minors. The New York World Telegram, March 29, 1958 published a full page feature article revealing teen-age drinking and drunkenness as a national problem. Surveys thus far made showed percentages from 18 to 90 in teen-agers who drink.
(4) The enormous consumption of grain, fruit, sugar, and other food elements in manufacturing alcoholic beverages constitute an immense waste of natural resources. This is especially true at a time when millions of people in the United States do not have enough good food in spite of our high standard of living and economic prosperity. And the food consumed in the making of alcohol could be of immense help in relieving the hunger of many millions of people in Asia and Africa who never know what it means to have a satisfying meal.
(5) The liquor traffic has never achieved distinction as a law abiding industry. While most retail establishments obey regulations and the majority refrain from selling liquor on Sundays, on election days, and on prohibited holidays, yet there are many violations.
(6) The prevalence of bootlegging and moonshining, notwithstanding the glib promises and assurances given by the liquor interests that repeal of the 18th amendment would do away with this illegal liquor traffic, is another debit. According to Donald I. Rogers in The New York Herald Tribune, bootlegging is now higher than at any time within the past 25 years. This hits three ways. First, it deprives state and federal governments of tax revenue. Second, it takes away profits from the legalized liquor industry. Bootlegging and moonshining are reputed to produce and distribute double the quantity of liquor made available by the legalized industry. Third, it compels the employment of an immense force of state and federal police agencies to hunt down hidden liquor stills and close up illegal retail disposal outlets. These law agencies work day and night. The illegal traffic is well organized by racketeers and fabulous fortunes have certainly been made in it.
(7) All across the land the jails are overcrowded. Alcoholic rehabilitation institutions are taxed to capacity. The organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous does a thriving business and renders a sadly needed service in redeeming multitudes of people caught in the frightful throes of alcoholism. No such institution was known 25 years ago. No one has calculated the huge public and private expense necessary to maintain these institutions for the housing and retention, or the possible cure of hordes of drunken bums and sots that are cast by the liquor traffic upon the human trash heap. Moreover, absenteeism from industrial plants and other factors of alcoholism now cost American industry one billion dollars a year.
(8) What is inexpressibly sad to contemplate is the increasing number of women drinkers. Many are known as “solo drinkers.” Take a walk through any cocktail lounge of a hotel during the afternoon or evening cocktail hours and observe the many women, victims of the liquor habit, who sit alone without companions or escorts. The woman “solo” drinker was an unknown phenomenon in American life prior to the repeal of prohibition.
(9) Terrifying is the steadily increasing number of confirmed alcoholics, now estimated at five million. According to the U. S. Department of Public Health, alcoholism is now the fourth most prevalent disease among the American people, exceeded in number of patients only by heart disease, cancer, and mental illness. The old term “alcoholic” has become something new in the American vocabulary. What makes this so ominous for the future of the nation is that 10 years after repeal, one out of eight confirmed alcoholics was a woman. Today one-fourth of all alcoholics are women! And the “quacks” are crowding in on these unhappy, wretched people, seeking to profit from their affliction. In its issue of March 22, 1958 The New York World Telegram carried a feature article on these charlatans and the fraudulent, so-called “rest homes” for the victims of alcoholism. All seek to mulct the afflicted and their confused and distressed families with vain promises of remedying the illness.
(10) The advertising industry merits severe condemnation in having created a liability and a debit in this alcoholic balance sheet. Gone is our previously cherished American privacy. Violated is the security and the sanctity of the home which from time immemorial the American has regarded as his castle. Through radio and television, by magazine and newspaper, every home today is invaded by the seductive pleas of the liquor traffic. In a recent full page newspaper advertisement, the brewing industry proudly boasted that beer is now served in two out of every three American homes. What a colossal tribute this is to the pernicious power of American advertising. Of course any American can shut off his radio and television and he can cease reading; but what a price he would thus have to pay for maintaining his freedom from liquor invasion. And if he seeks to escape it by a drive into the country, the omnipresent billboard advertisement forces his attention to the enticement of drink. In its promotion of the use of alcohol, the liquor traffic is guilty of the most brazen effrontery, lack of good taste, and indeed offensive sacrilege. I have before me a half-page newspaper advertisement in which appears the following highly revolting suggestion:
May we suggest champagne for your Sunday breakfast? Orange juice may be adequate for week-day breakfast. But comes Sunday, you owe yourself a little of that feeling of ineffable luxury that comes only from a bottle of champagne before Sunday noon. A couple of glasses of this beverage with your late Sunday breakfast and you will spend the rest of the day with your feet planted firmly in the clouds.
Thus while many Americans regard Sunday forenoon as the time for worshipping God in church or synagogue, the advertising industry suggests a substitute—champagne for Sunday breakfast. And surely by this time, after 25 years of it, the American people have become altogether hardened to the vicious Christmas advertising campaign that saturates many magazines and newspapers with full pages, beginning early in the fall, and aiming to persuade the American people that the best of all Christmas gifts is a bottle of whiskey! Fortunately some national magazines have not yielded to the temptation of this seductive advertising liquor revenue. These stand in terrific contrast to others whose liquor advertising runs into many pages.
Efforts to curtail liquor advertising, especially through radio and television, have hereto been futile. A bill introduced into the Senate a year ago by Senator William Langer never emerged from the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. A few public hearings were scheduled but these were largely a sop to people opposed to liquor advertising. Said the Senator as he introduced his bill, “Alcoholic beverage advertising is educating Americans to turn their homes into drinking places and their children into juvenile delinquents.”
(11) Finally, the huge casualty list on the highways constitutes a frightful indictment of the liquor traffic and adds unspeakable tragedy to the balance sheet, because alcohol and gasoline do not mix. Even the liquor industry has had to recognize some responsibility for highway tragedies and mutilations, as evidenced by the new familiar New Year’s Eve distillery advertising, “If you must have one for the road, make it coffee!” For it is now a well-established fact that one for the road really means one for the morgue. And to protect themselves, liquor interests will also admonish you, “If you drive, don’t drink; if you drink, don’t drive.”
How many thousands of people of all ages have been mutilated, crippled for life, or instantly killed on the streets and highways across the United States because somebody was driving under the influence of liquor, will never be known. Some day a life insurance actuary, to cultivate new life or accident insurance rates, will make it his business to calculate these highway casualties. According to The Hartford Courant, the United States with its highway death rate of 23.4 per 100,000 outranks every other nation on earth. The fact that one large insurance company offers accident policies at considerably lower rates to people who do not drink, is itself evidence that drunken driving has become a frightful menace. There seems to be a studied effort, even a determination in the newspapers not to publish these grisly statistics, and to play down any publicity that reveals a highway casualty to have been due to liquor.
What is more serious is the absence of pressure on the part of municipal authorities to hold such drivers responsible. In my own county of Westchester in New York State, The Yonkers Herald Statesman reports that in 10 years hundreds of motorists have escaped criminal prosecution for alcoholic driving fatality cases because of failure of municipal authorities. Yet more than half of the 589 automobile deaths in the county during the 10-year period were definitely traceable to driving while under the influence of liquor. There has not been a single conviction. Many officials admit privately, said this newspaper, that the pressure upon them and on doctors, lawyers, and judges to hide the evidence “is terrific.” In New York City in 1957 more than half of the automobile drivers instantly killed or who died within 24 hours after their accidents, according to The New York Times, were under the influence of liquor.
A recent cartoon in Light pictured these assets and liabilities, these credits and debits in the alcoholic balance sheet in picturesque but grim fashion. The cartoon showed a small retail liquor store with a halo over the roof and angelic wings attached to its side walls. The sign over the door read, “Little Innocent Liquor Store.” Below the building was the caption, “What the liquor traffic would have YOU believe.” Then beside the little store the cartoonist had pictured the street with a huge bag being emptied of its contents. The caption read, “The Actual Cost of the Little Innocent Liquor Store.” Out of the huge black bag fell an immense array of evil things. I list them only partially; vice and crime bill, alcoholic hospitals, adult delinquency, broken homes, juvenile delinquency, lost working hours, wasted resources, insane asylums, reformatories, jails, drunken driving, accidents, property damages, and highway deaths.
Here is indeed a grim, sorry, disillusioning, tragic alcoholic balance sheet. In the realm of corporate finance, any business concern whose balance sheet showed such a preponderance of liabilities and debts against assets and credits, would instantly be hailed into court as bankrupt. How many more years must pass before the American people come to realize that their liquor policy, resulting from the constitutional repeal of the 18th amendment, has brought about social and moral bankruptcy? This is the situation that confronts us on this 25th anniversary of repeal.
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Money And Missions—Advance Or Retreat?
One of the problems always confronting missionaries and missions has been the wise use of money. In years past many a missionary unwittingly harmed his cause by using the funds at his disposal either for ill-conceived projects or for the personal advantage and control of nationals who found in this contact from abroad a source of income of undreamed proportions, and who in turn identified themselves with the church on a basis far more mundane than spiritual.
The danger of “rice Christians” and individual missionaries contributing to this distortion of apostolic missions was recognized from the beginning by some of the great pioneers. Realizing that no church fulfills its function properly until it is self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating, some of the missionary statesmen of past generations undertook to establish mission-wide policies which would guard against subsidization of the national church with funds from abroad and the control of that church from people abroad.
In Korea the Presbyterians established this policy as early as the turn of the century, and the Nevius plan, as it was called, resulted in the strongest national church on almost any mission field in the world. Much the same policy was carried out in Brazil by Presbyterian missionaries. And therefore, in both Korea and Brazil churches developed which stood on their own feet and accepted their responsibilities in regard to support, control, and witness.
Today a serious, even tragic reversal is taking place. Where in the early days of missions it was some missionary who pauperized and controlled local followers and congregations, it is now certain boards and missionary organizations which are reverting to this previously discarded principle and in so doing are in grave danger of subsidizing and pauperizing national churches and exercising control over individuals through the use of money.
The so-called “Ecumenical Mission” is an illustration of this startling reversal. Where missionary organizations once exercised careful supervision of mission funds from abroad (a supervision which was increasingly meticulous, guarding above all else the integrity of the national church and national Christians), this supervision has been abolished in favor of funds administered by organizations here in America and channeled directly to the national church and individuals in that church through special grants and scholarships.
Under this supposedly new concept of inter-church aid between the sending and receiving churches, many feel that a turning-back-of-the-clock is being effected, which can work untold harm through existing national churches.
Few of the less mature churches on the mission fields of the world will be able to resist this subsidizing from abroad; and, in accepting any funds which are then used in the normal functioning of an independent church, there will be this inevitable turning of eyes to these foreign sources and away from the hard realities of local stewardship.
Moreover, by providing special grants and scholarships for nationals to study abroad, the boards at home will be opening up a dangerous field of control. Already word comes of such scholarships being offered from New York, but with restrictions as to the place in which study is to be taken. By such monetary control, in New York or elsewhere, the eventual shaping of the thought and policies of a whole church could take place.
In making such an “advance” in mission policies, we should take great care that it does not prove to be a backward step, one in which the life of national churches is actually at stake.
The early days of so-called missionary imperialism were thought to be gone. Yet today we may be facing an era of ecumenical imperialism through which receiving churches could well be pauperized and their leadership indoctrinated and regimented. Subsidizing the churches is not the answer.
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Are The Friends A Bit Too Friendly?
The Friends Peace Committee of Philadelphia made public another pacifistic message to President Eisenhower last month. The message urged (1) United States recognition of Communist China, (2) Nationalist troop withdrawal from Quemoy-Matsu, and (3) “assurance that the United States will not support military attack from Taiwan or its islands.”
If Mao Tse-tung were able to dictate free world policy aimed at capitulation to communism, it may be questioned whether he could come up with suggestions more suited to his purposes than these now advanced by the Quakers.
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