Prohibition in Monroe County had its challenges
Monroe County History by Nancy Stone
|
|
|
Part of a legislator’s job description is to pass laws that try to micro-manage the public behavior in the best interest of individual health and welfare. Across the nation, more than 40,000 new laws take effect in 2010. Many of them are state laws specifically designed to force their citizens to live a safer, healthier lifestyle. Only time will tell if those laws succeed or like the 18th Amendment to the United Constitution, they will be considered a “noble experiment that failed.”
Ninety years ago, on January 17, 1920, a nation-wide law known as the Volstead Act took effect that was supposed to save the nation from the evils of drink. Ten days later the Monroe City NEWS published a chronology of previous legislation that had tried, unsuccessfully, to control the use and sale of alcohol for 278 years.
The Maryland Colony passed the first liquor law in 1642. It punished drunkenness with a fine of 100 pounds of tobacco. Due to the increase in trade with the Native Americans, Maryland also passed a law in 1715 that levied a fine of 3,000 pounds of tobacco against anyone selling “more than a gallon of liquor a day to Indians.”
Other colonies were no less tolerant of intemperance. New Jersey set 9 p.m. as the cut off time for serving liquor. New Hampshire forbade innkeepers from letting guests drink on Saturday night or Sunday. Massachusetts innkeepers were fined for serving a drunken man. Virginia clergymen were prohibited from imbibing too much sacramental wine.
In 1791 the Federal government imposed a tax on whiskey distillers to help pay down the nation’s debt from the Revolutionary War. Small farmers, whose stills were a significant source of income, objected to the nine cents per gallon tax on their products when larger distillers, such as then President George Washington, were charged six. The discrepancy in taxation led first to civil protest and in 1794 erupted into armed rebellion and assaults on tax collectors. The force that Washington pulled from several states to put down the “Whiskey Rebellion” was by some reports larger than those he commanded during the war and the first instance of martial law.
What the government saw as a source of tax revenue, others saw as an evil influence over mankind. The first Temperance Society was formed in 1789 in Litchfield, Connecticut. The movement spread in an attempt to dethrone “King Alcohol.” Church leaders campaigned for sobriety with impassioned pleas to citizens to “sign the pledge” of abstinence in the early 1800s while states continued to tax those who produced and sold intoxicants. In 1839 Connecticut invented “local option,” by leaving the licensing of saloons to the towns themselves.
By 1875 there were two Temperance Societies in Monroe City. According to the Monroe City NEWS there had been no dram shops in town for six or eight years, although Major Livingston kept a barrel of Kentucky bourbon for his guests at the hotel.
The world’s first convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was also held in Boston in 1891 and in the spring of 1892 a group of Monroe City women formed a local W.C.T.U. Chapter. That fall the NEWS reported that, “A petition for a saloon in Monroe City is being quietly though vigorously circulated, and it is reported that enough names will be secured to get the saloon. This is a very good time to get up the petition. The anti-saloon people are poorly organized and may not demonstrate against the dram shops as hard as in times past.”
A legal saloon was finally opened three doors south of the Farmers & Merchants Bank building by George W. Paris and George Mudd in August 1893. They paid the City $1,000 for the license. Paris and his partner’s brother, Hugh Mudd, had previously been fined for “selling liquor contrary to law.” When the Garner Brothers obtained a liquor license in March 1897 the editor of the NEWS said: “We fail to see wherein there is any demand for another saloon in Monroe. We already have one saloon where many men spend their dimes instead of buying bread for their starving families, and two would only double the suffering of the wives and children who are in need from this cause.”
By 1900, towns with a population of over 2,000 were permitted by state law to issue a dram license without majority approval of the local taxpayers. The census taken that year showed Monroe City only had a population of 1929 and a special census was ordered by the Board of Aldermen since the town had added several heavily populated acres to their corporate limits after the federal census was taken.
The movement for a national prohibition law began August 1, 1917 when the United States Senate adopted the resolution providing for submission to the states of the national prohibition amendment to the Constitution. The following December 18, similar approval was given by the House of Representatives. By then many states had already passed prohibition laws. Missouri voters defeated the proposition in 1910, 1916 and 1918.
The nation was at war and President Wilson did not wait for the Eighteenth Amendment to become effective January 16, 1920 to make the country bone dry. Under the war-time provisions act every saloon in the country was closed by presidential order at midnight June 30, 1919. United States Attorney General Gregory issued a ruling in mid-July to state attorney generals that the presidential order was legal and “any persons in local option counties who transports intoxicating liquors in any manner hereafter except for medicinal, sacramental, scientific, or mechanical purposes, whether by express freight, automobile or by person does so at the risk of prosecution.”
It seemed initially that national prohibition might work. The NEWS of February 18, 1920 reported that the Ralls County jail had housed no prisoners since January 6. “Before the nation became bone dry, there were from 15-18 inmates at New London each month.”
On a less positive note, that same issue told of a related tragedy at Mexico, MO: “Elijah Watts, an employee of the Mexico Transfer Company, died Monday, and Bert Johnson, foreman of the company, is blind and believed to be dying, and Bruce Piper, owner of the company, is critically ill as the result of drinking wood alcohol Sunday night. They were in the transfer company’s office when they drank what they thought was whiskey.”
The Volstead Act, as the 18th Amendment was known, gave concurrent enforcement of the laws against the manufacture and sale of alcohol to federal, state and local officials. By the mid 1920’s organized crime stepped in to quench the thirst of city dwellers and local stills supplied the demand in Monroe County. In late July 1927, the NEWS reported that Sheriff Horace Peak and his deputies captured two gallons of what was said to be moonshine whiskey from the O. F. Woodson store at Stoutsville. Col. F. E. Williams and Harry Long were also arrested on a farm two miles east of Goss in connection with the largest still ever seen in Monroe County.
According to the Paris Mercury, “Monroe Countians, most of whom are of Kentucky descent, and who prided themselves on drinking none but good liquor in pre-Volstead days, are aghast at the fact that the container for the product of the two big stills captured in the raid on the place of Col. F. E. Williams, the one-armed auctioneer, east of Paris, last week, was a baby’s coffin. Whether or not the casket had even been used is still to be decided and on top of that it was full of flies and wood insects. They are willing to take a chance on corn liquor, but balk at bugs and coffins.
Enforcement of the law was an overwhelming burden to the Federal Court system and many states, including Missouri, refused to prosecute violators.
In a speech at St. Louis Oct. 21, 1930 Missouri Senator Harry B. Hawes addressed what President Hoover had called a “noble experiment.” Sen. Hawes said: “To be noble a thing must be good, it must be honorable, it must achieve something and we know the Volstead Act has not done this. We were promised that prohibition would fill our churches with worshipers, empty our jails and asylums; that crime would decrease, health improve and there would be general happiness and contentment. Instead, prohibition has resulted in a huge increase in crime and a general disregard for law and order. The “experiment” failed because an impatient group of meddlesome people, impatient with local government and local control, sought through an amendment to the constitution to force their own opinion, through the law, over large sections of our county and millions of people who are opposed to prohibition.”
“The people,” Hawes said, “have come to know there is nothing sacred about the Volstead Act, that it may be amended by any congress and president who have the courage to deal with it.”
After more than a decade of heated controversy, prohibition was repealed. The 21st Amendment, was fully ratified by state conventions Dec. 5, 1933. It was the only Amendment ever proposed for the express purpose of overturning a previous amendment to the Constitution and to date the only one ratified by state conventions whereby no changes could be made to the proposal, only accepted or rejected.
4521
100106
1/6/2010
his
|
