The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part L: The Character(s) of a Nation

     The differences between urban and rural America obviously formed the crux of the choice before the Senate in February of 1933 of whether to allow the state legislatures to determine the fate of the 21^st Amendment or grant that same responsibility to specially summoned conventions. Rural America had arguably given rise to the Temperance Movement in the first place, many of its most prominent leaders having been raised in and shaped by primarily agrarian environs. Founders and early leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union like Annie Wittenmyer (1827-1900) and Frances Willard (1839-1898) had come from sparsely populated places like Adams County, Ohio and Churchville, New York, while the famous hatchet-bearing Carrie Nation (1846-1911) was a native of rural Gerard County, Kentucky. The Anti-Saloon League similarly drew most of its leadership from the nation’s many rural hamlets. Its most famous organizer, Wayne Wheeler, was from Brookfield Township, Ohio, while one of its most ardent activists, William E. Johnson (1862-1945) was born in Coventry, New York and spent most of his career as a law officer in places like Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Furthermore, thanks to its deliberate habit of connecting abstinence from alcohol to moral and spiritual wellbeing, the League drew its most enthusiastic support from the many evangelical Christian congregations that dotted the rural South and Midwest. For people like Wheeler, Johnson, and the first president of the League, a lawyer and clergyman named Howard Hyde Russell (1855-1946), the excessive consumption of alcohol was a social ill with profound consequences for the health of the American soul. It was only through abstinence, discipline, and adherence to a specifically Protestant brand of individual morality that the United States might save itself from sinking into a morass of corruption, licentiousness, and criminality, and it was only the pure morals of the nation’s simple country folk – as opposed to the city-dweller who lived cheek-by-jowl with unwashed immigrants and faced temptation on every street corner – that were fit for emulation. An alliance with the resurgent Ku Klux Klan – by way of their shared employment of a fund-raising agency called the Southern Publicity Association – helped to solidify this association and make plain to all and sundry that temperance had become a fundamental political feature of contemporary rural America.

    Contemporary urban America, on the other hand, was characterized primarily by the presence of two groups on the opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. On the one hand were the wealthy, either of old-money stock – like the legendary Boston Brahmin, the Astors of New York, or the residents of Philadelphia’s suburban Main Line communities – or members of the post-Industrial Revolution nouveau riche – like the New York-based Rockefellers and Morgans, California’s William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), and the east coast Vanderbilts. These well-heeled urban dwellers in many cases owned a significant portion of the real estate of whichever city they called home, engaged in some amount of philanthropy by building hospitals and libraries, kept summer homes in places like New Haven, Connecticut and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and engaged in state and national politics as a kind of idle pastime. Prohibition, by and large, affected them very little. While many of them were formally members of some mainline sect of American Protestantism, they were generally quite far – in terms of temperament and self-perception – from the rural evangelicals whose horror of vice and self-righteous censoriousness helped drive the American Temperance Movement to the height of its considerable power at the beginning of the 20^th century. And when Prohibition was finally enacted nationally by way of the 18^th Amendment, the nation’s wealthiest inhabitants simply threw money at the problem. While it remained legal to buy and produce alcohol between the ratification of the amendment in 1919 and its enactment in 1920, they bought up every bottle they could find and created personal stockpiles. And when those stockpiles eventually ran dry, they proceeded to buy from whoever was selling. The markup that resulted from their alcohol having to be either smuggled into the country or manufactured illegally doubtless stung those who were more self-conscious of their finances than others, but this was about the worst that the wealthy urbanite had to deal with.

    On the other hand, of course, were the nation’s urban poor. Within this much larger group were included, not only the saloon keepers, brewery and distillery workers, and stevedores whose livelihoods had been directly affected by the cessation of alcohol importation, sales, and manufacturing, but also the innocent victims of many a territorial dispute between Prohibition-fueled criminal organizations and the many millions more who wanted nothing more than a drink to take the edge off after a long day’s work. Of particular note among this cohort were the many immigrant communities that had taken root in urban America beginning in the late 19^th century. Whereas, prior to the 1850s, most migrants to the United States came from places like Britain, Germany, and France, the effects of the Great Famine (1845-1849) and the British government’s hands-off response to the same dramatically increased the rate at which Irish Catholics were making the trans-Atlantic crossing over the course of the 1850s and 1860s. Over the next several decades, as steam power became the standard on civilian and well as military vessels, passenger fares began to decrease and it became increasingly possible for economically disadvantaged populations in some of the poorer regions of Europe to likewise migrate to the American republic. In consequence, beginning in the 1880s and extending well into the 20^th century, immigration from places like Italy, the Russian Empire, and Greece rose by several orders of magnitude, utterly transforming entire neighborhoods in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago into ethnic enclaves whose demographic profiles diverged significantly from what had been the 19^th century American baseline. Indeed, while many of these new arrivals were as pious as their newfound American neighbors, their Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish faiths lent them very different attitudes towards discussions of public morality than the average evangelical Protestant.

    What this would seem to amount to, by and large, is a fairly straightforward binary. The rural population of the United States, circa 1933, had both deeply influenced and been deeply influenced by the grassroots social and political movement that gave rise to the 18^th Amendment and its resulting prohibitory regime. The most prominent temperance activists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries had come primarily from the rural hamlets and small county towns of the American South and Midwest and carried with them into their work a sense of moral urgency and righteous purpose deeply colored by the evangelical churches which had historically helped bind these isolated communities together. The addition of modern lobbying and publicity techniques – thanks to private agencies like the aforementioned Southern Publicity Association – helped to harness these same pietistic attitudes for the purpose of achieving a series of well-defined political goals, the culmination of which was national prohibition. The urban population of this same era, by contrast, held somewhat more ambivalent attitudes. The wealthy, as a rule, were neither pious enough nor poor enough to have been all that strongly affected by either the initial campaign for Prohibition or its practical implications. Indeed, the worst that most of them could say for the concept was that it had cost them a little more than they would have otherwise spent on alcohol. The urban poor, meanwhile, had significant reason to find fault with the whole temperance crusade. Not only had many of them lost their jobs as a result of the 18^th Amendment’s nationwide ban on the importation, sale, and manufacture of intoxicating beverages, but those that belonged to the nation’s Catholic population in particular – being primarily Irish, Italian, or Eastern European – tended to be uncomfortable with the idea of government defining moral behavior and held wine to be an essential component of one of their holiest sacraments.

    Bearing all of this in mind, if the Senators who had assembled for the final meeting of the 72^nd Congress in February of 1933 had decided to submit their draft amendment to the constitution repealing Prohibition to the customary ratification mechanism, this would necessarily have amounted to asking the part of the country that had given birth to the Temperance Movement in the first place to voluntarily dismantle that same cohort’s crowning achievement. Thanks to chronic malapportionment, rural voters held much greater sway than their urban counterparts in the various state legislatures, the result of which was that rural interests tended to dominate state politics. And contemporary rural voters still tended towards the pietistic, parochial, and moralizing attitudes which had, less than a generation earlier, ushered the 18^th Amendment from approval by Congress to ratification by the states in a little more than a year. To ask the state legislatures to approve of a draft proposal for repealing the 18^th Amendment would accordingly have been as good as consigning it to failure. This, of course, is what certain members of Congress would most definitely have preferred. If, like Senator Sheppard, they could not defeat the proposed amendment during the regular course of debate, they might at least ensure its rejection by essentially the same group of state lawmakers that had originally enacted Prohibition just over a decade prior.  

    If, on the other hand, this same group of Senators opted to submit their repeal proposal to special conventions in each of the states, the mass of urban voters who would otherwise have been shut out of the ratification process might finally have the chance to make their voices heard. Granted, it was only a chance. Congress opted not to provide specific instructions to the states as to the exact mechanism by which the aforesaid conventions were to be summoned. Certain state governments, in consequence, may have opted to elect convention delegates on the basis of existing county or district boundaries. In light of the fact that the legislative malapportionment discussed above was more often than not the product of wide population disparities between certain counties or districts within a given state – be they intentional or otherwise – this would likely have resulted in a body possessed of the same general character as the legislature it was meant to replace. Then again, summoning a convention by such complex means would almost certainly have taken as much time and energy as holding a normal legislative election, the prospect of which many voters would doubtless have disapproved. Simply allowing the “yea” and “nay” sides to organize slates of delegates and then holding a statewide vote to determine which of them would meet in convention would have inarguably taken less time. Not only that, but the resulting convention would hardly need to meet for more than a single day. Having been elected, en bloc, to vote a certain way, the assembled delegates need only call the roll, record the votes, and then adjourn in perpetuity.

    With the Senate voting in favor of the repeal proposal by a margin of 63-23 and the House following suit to the tune of 289-121, it would seem obvious that most of the assembled members of the 72^nd Congress were indeed in favor of eliminating Prohibition as an instrument of national policy. It would also seem obvious, in consequence, why this same group of lawmakers ultimately settled upon allowing state conventions to ratify the proposal rather than letting the state legislatures have their say. The former method, to put it simply, was far more likely to result in success. So what, then, did the states do? How did they respond to this unprecedented directive on the part of Congress? Well, most of them, unsurprisingly, saw the light of reason. Of the thirty-seven states that opted to hold conventions in 1933, almost all of them did so on the basis of a simple statewide vote. The reason for this, beyond basic efficiency, likely had a fair bit to do with the essential calculus of political survival. Most of the state assemblies, to be sure, were grossly malapportioned in favor of rural over urban voters, thereby seeming to limit the extent to which dissatisfied urbanites in a given state could conceivably punish state lawmakers who determined to minimize the former’s influence within the aforementioned special conventions. Their ability of urban residents of the states to “vote the bums out,” as it were, was inherently quite limited. That being said, there were – and are – more ways for disgruntled voters to make their frustrations known than by directly attacking the source of the same.

    Circa 1933, recall, the United States of America was in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis for which the administration of President Herbert Hoover in particular, and the Republican Party in general, had absorbed the lion’s share of the blame. Granted, neither Hoover nor his cabinet were directly responsible for creating the financially precarious conditions which had then tumbled into recession in the fall of 1929. But the president’s actions – or lack thereof – in the months and years that followed the aforementioned stock market collapse certainly hadn’t done very much to shore up the nation’s flagging economic prospects. Indeed, in more ways than one, they had made the situation worse. The American public had already demonstrated the degree to which it made the connection between the nation’s economic woes and the Republican Party by cutting the latter’s Senate majority to a single seat during the 1930 mid-term elections while also shifting the majority in the House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic control. As the nation’s financial outlook continued to deteriorate thereafter, a similar outcome looked set to occur by way of the Election of 1932. The Republicans, in short, were in for another shellacking at the polls, and it behooved every member of the relevant party organization then serving in government to decided for themselves how best to respond. They could either go down with the ship, like Reed Smoot, Morris Sheppard, or Herbert Hoover himself, defending to the last the unpopular positions that the American people had come to identify with the causes of their ongoing misery. Or, determined to fight another day, they could go the way of John Blaine, Arthur Vandenberg (1884-1951), or William Borah (1865-1940), all three of them Republican Senators who made a point of distancing themselves from the increasingly unpopular Hoover Administration by supporting public relief programs up to and including the repeal of Prohibition. There was no guarantee, of course, that the voters would respond to the latter position by declining to vote the relevant legislator out of office. But as obstinance was a far likelier guarantee of defeat at the polls, more than a few Republicans opted for the better part of valor.

    By the latter half of the winter of 1932/33, of course, the die had already largely been cast. The Election of 1932 had indeed been a blowout for the Democrats, resulting in supermajorities in both houses of Congress and the first Democrat elected to the White House since 1916. But while it might seem as though the nation’s various Republican state legislators should have been relatively insulated from this dramatic turnover by the effects of the aforementioned malapportionment – placing their fates, as it did, in the hands of pro-temperance rural voters – these same individuals in fact had ample reason to want to appear responsive to the national mood. So thoroughly had the Great Depression upended the nation’s previously established political calculus that even the misdrawing of electoral boundaries could no longer guarantee political success. Clearly, it was not enough to simply isolate a state’s urban population in a handful of districts in order to sideline the Democratic vote. For the Democrats to have won as commandingly as they had in 1932, millions of people who had previously voted Republican would need to have changed their preference. What this meant, in states traditionally controlled by the Republican Party, was that otherwise “safe” Republican electoral districts were now potentially vulnerable. It might have been possible to staunch the bleeding if the vulnerable Republicans in question made a point of endorsing a popular Democratic priority, of course, like the rapid repeal of Prohibition. Even in states traditionally controlled by the Democrats, this same basic arithmetic applied. If members of the officially pro-repeal Democratic Party outwardly attempted to engineer the relevant conventions so as to make the defeat of repeal more likely, local Wets could be counted on to rally public support during the next round of primaries.

    Not every Democratic voter was fervently in support of repeal, it bears noting, a fact which the results of the various state convention elections make clear. While, of the aforementioned states that opted to hold ratification conventions in 1933, a significant number voted overwhelmingly in favor of the pro-repeal slates on offer – including such varied jurisdictions as New York (88.7%), Florida (80.14%), Missouri (76.24%), and Washington (70.18%) – some voted for repeal by much slimmer margins – Arkansas (59.47%), Alabama (58.67%), and Idaho (58.02%) for example – and Democratic strongholds South Carolina (47.99) and North Carolina (29.05%) voted decisively against. Evidently, though the Democrats as a party had coalesced around a pro-repeal policy position in 1932, Democratic voters in North and South Carolina alike were of the opinion that Prohibition had not yet had its day. These deviations from the norm notwithstanding, however, Prohibition was ultimately repealed. Every other state convention, when finally summoned into existence, voted as was expected to ratify the proposed amendment. Indeed, not only was the final result very nearly unanimous, by it was arrived at with a degree of speed that had never before been seen. The first approval came on April 10^th at the behest of the State of Michigan. By July 10^th, three months later, the tally had risen to ten states. By October 10^th, six months later, it rested at twenty-six. And on December 5^th, less than eight months after Michigan had sent things in motion, Utah became the thirty-sixth and last state required to ratify the relevant proposal. Less than twenty minutes later – the events of the Utah convention were being broadcast nationally – Acting Secretary of State William Phillips (1878-1968) certified the 21^st Amendment as having been adopted. The 18^th Amendment was thereby repealed and Prohibition consigned to the dustbin of history.

    As to whether the 21^st Amendment was either popular or institutional, the answer would seem to be that it was very much the former. Just as the original draft of the 18^th Amendment had been approved by the Senate in response to a national pressure campaign years in the making – the thrust of which was that favoring temperance would provide access to valuable political resources – the proposal whose ratification resulted in the repeal of Prohibition was guided through that same body by a group of legislators who had cause to believe that their support would effectively purchase for them their continued political survival. There were, of course, in both instances, people who acted out of conscience. Many of the Senators who voted in favor of Prohibition in 1917 doubtless did so out of a sincere desire to protect the essential moral character of the American republic from the corrosive influence of freely available intoxicating beverages. And there were surely more than a few Senators in attendance in 1933 who likewise voted in favor of repeal because they felt, out of a sense of purest conviction, that it was not the place of government to police the private behavior of the American people. In either case, however, it would be unforgivably myopic to discount the influence that was being exerted upon the conversation at hand by the many and varied constituents to which all of these lawmakers were ultimately beholden.

    Indeed, it may have been the case that many of the Senators who ended up supporting Prohibition in the first place did so precisely because they had been sent to Congress for that express purpose. Morris Sheppard springs to mind as just such an individual. The American Temperance Movement spent years – nay, decades – lobbying not only for prohibitory laws and constitutional amendments in the states, but also on electing like-minded individuals – like Sheppard – to Congress. An amendment to the United States Constitution was always their ultimate goal, and achieving that goal required the placement of known allies in the right positions. The 21^st Amendment was not the product of the same kind of long-running grassroots campaign, to be sure. Far from being decades in the making, it progressed from proposal to reality in a remarkably short amount of time. But it was still, undeniably, the result of popular agitation. Not only had the various state appendages of the Democratic Party sent an overwhelming majority of pro-repeal delegates to its national convention in June of 1932 – resulting in the selection of an outwardly pro-repeal candidate for president – but the American people then proceeded, in November of that same year, to elect a pro-repeal Democrat to the White House by a significant margin of victory. In both cases, in order to ensure that a specific policy which they favored was ultimately enacted, the American people discharged their electoral responsibilities in an especially judicious fashion.

    To be sure, more issues than just Prohibition were litigated during the relevant race for president. The American economy was presently in shambles and the two major party nominees harbored markedly different attitudes as to how the national government ought to respond. But Prohibition was definitely one of the issues under discussion, and perhaps even among the most important. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with the simultaneous defeat of as many as one hundred anti-repeal members of Congress, could thus fairly be characterized as a kind of public referendum on the issue of national Prohibition. And while a number of particularly ardent Drys declined to rethink their position and accepted the disapprobation of their constituents, many others who had previously voted in favor of Prohibition publicly reversed themselves – like the aforementioned Senators Vandenberg and Borah – and came out in favor of repeal. Few of them, to be sure, would have admitted to changing their tune simply as a means of political self-preservation. But as concerned as elected officials are often forced to become by the circumstances of their occupation with public opinion and perception, it would seem next to impossible to believe that self-preservation wasn’t a primary motivating factor for many of them all the same. The 17^th Amendment, of course, is what set this dynamic in place. By giving the American people nearly direct control over their representation in the Senate, it changed the character of Congress as a whole and forever altered the kinds of constitutional amendments that that same body would go on to consider and approve.           

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXXIX: Political Arithmetic

             As mentioned at the very beginning of the present discussion, the ratification of the 21^st Amendment was an exceptional event in the history of the United States of America. Whereas every other amendment to the constitution, before and since, was submitted to the state legislatures for either approval or rejection, the Senate Joint Resolution that would eventually become the 21^st Amendment was specifically authorized by Congress to be discussed and then voted upon by special conventions summoned for that purpose in each of the extant forty-eight states. For a time during the debates which gave rise to said resolution, this feature was excised from the original draft and replaced by an equivalent clause mandating the more familiar method utilizing state assemblies. Such was the state of the resolution when it was voted out of committee on January 9^th, 1933. In fact, it was only after the defeat of a one-man filibuster on the part of Texas Senator Morris Sheppard and the resumption of the discussion at hand on February 15^th that Arkansas Senator Joseph Robinson insisted on putting forward an amendment to the relevant proposal restoring the state convention clause which the document’s originator, Wisconsin Senator John Blaine, had first proposed on December 6^th. After a lengthy and wide-ranging debate, Robinson’s amendment was comfortably approved by a vote of 45-15 and the repeal resolution was once more transformed into a kind of popular referendum on national prohibition.

Clearly, based on this back and forth over the period of December 6^th to February 15^th, the idea of calling special ratifying conventions was more than a little contentious among the membership of the upper house of the 72^nd Congress. It was part of Blaine’s original draft, was then removed during markup in committee, and was then reinstated as an amendment offered by Senator Robinson of Arkansas. Evidently, different groups of Senators had very different ideas about the proper mechanism by which the repeal of the 18^th Amendment ought to have been submitted to the people. And yet, based on the fact that the amendment ultimately responsible for shifting responsibility back onto the state conventions was approved by a substantial margin – 45-15, with 36 abstentions – most of those present felt it to be especially important. Why was this the case? Evidently, the supporters of repeal – who were proven to be in the majority – believed that an amendment to that effect was more likely to be approved by a series of special conventions than by the existing legislatures of the various states. But what brought them to this conclusion? Why did they imagine that the state assemblies were likely to quash their attempt at repealing Prohibition and what was the practical result of their successful effort to circumvent them?

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the answer to the first question has everything to do with the concept and practice of apportionment in the United States of America. More specifically, it has to do with the apportionment of legislative seats in the various state assemblies. In theory, under the terms of the constitutions of the various states, the principle of legislative equality stands as the paramount consideration for any distribution of legislative representatives. That is to say, every voter, regardless of where they live, should be able to exert the same effect upon the legislative process as every other voter living within the same state. The simplest way to accomplish this, of course, is to mandate a set ratio of voters to representatives. If electoral districts are drawn in such a way as to ensure that every legislator represents as near as possible to five thousand, or ten thousand, or fifty thousand people, every voter could theoretically lay claim to the same degree of access to their elected representative. Not only that, but every voter could also take comfort in their vote carrying the same weight as that of every one of their fellow citizens. The vicissitudes of regional geography – not to mention the ability of campaign donations to catch the attention of lawmakers running for reelection – will naturally skew the degree to which every voter can meaningfully interact with their assigned legislator or the extent to which certain districts or precincts are either underrepresented or overrepresented. But the ideal goal is always to create a baseline that is as flat as possible across an entire state. In practice, of course, this is much easier said than done.

While some states within the American republic come relatively close to achieving a condition of homogenous population density across rural and urban areas, such an even distribution of people and communities is most definitely not the norm. In most cases, the population of a given state varies widely between densely populated cities and sparsely populated countryside, the latter often interspersed with small knots of semi-urban density in the form of scattered towns and villages. Consider, by way of example, several different counties located in the State of New York. New York County – which jurisdiction is coextensive with the Borough of Manhattan – is extremely dense and completely urbanized, with a total population (circa 2020) of 1,694,251 and a population density of 74,780.7/square mile. Suffolk County, to the east on Long Island, is similarly populous – 1,525,920 – but far less dense – 1,637.0/square mile – being primarily suburban in nature with large population clusters spread across a series of moderately-sized towns and cities. Onondaga County, located in Central New York, is comparatively both less populous – 476,516 – and less dense – 600.0/square mile – though its county seat, Syracuse – 148,620 – is over three times as large as Suffolk’s own administrative center at Riverhead. And then, finally, there is Hamilton County in the so-called “North Country,” a jurisdiction whose population – 5,107 – and population density – 3.0/square mile – make it the smallest and least dense county in the whole of the United States east of the Mississippi River. Bearing in mind, once again, that not every state is so diverse in terms of its population distribution, New York nevertheless provides a vivid example of the kinds of problems which much immediately present themselves to anyone who would attempt to fashion a series of electoral districts in which every legislator represents approximately the same number of constituents.

Consider – by way of a patently ludicrous hypothetical – what would happen if Hamilton County were to form the baseline, with one delegate to the state’s House of Representatives assigned to all of its five thousand inhabitants. How many representatives must then be assigned to Onondaga County? Approximately ninety-five. To Suffolk County? Three hundred and five. To the Borough of Manhattan? Three hundred and thirty-nine. Combined, under such a scheme, these four counties alone would send seven hundred and forty delegates to the state assembly in Albany, a number far in excess of its present lower house total of one hundred and fifty. Using the same ratio of constituents to representatives for every other county, New York would be left with a legislative body larger than any other in the world. As such an outcome would naturally present the state and people of New York with a whole host of logistical challenges – not the least of which would almost certainly be a glacially-slow pace of legislation – the number of voters assigned to a single lawmaker must necessarily be increased. But herein lies the real challenge. Increase the number so as to produce a relatively small body of delegates, cities maintain reasonably distinct representation while rural areas get grouped together into large, amorphous districts. Lower the number so as to ensure accurate representation, rural areas become more clearly represented while the number of delegates elected in the cities multiplies by factors of magnitude. Bearing the undesirable consequences of each of these extremes in mind, the only logical approach is accordingly to vary the ratio of constituents based on relative population density while staying as close to a predetermined average as possible. In order to keep the size of a given legislature more or less reasonable, of course, some decisions must be made that bring about a degree of representative imbalance.

Most states, fortunately, has been apportioned quite equitably of late. In New York State, for example, the City of New York is represented in Albany – as of 2022 – by a total of sixty-five delegates spread across New York County, Queens County, Kings County, Bronx County, and Richmond County. The total population of New York City being presently just shy of nine million people, each delegate sent from there to the lower house of the state assembly accordingly represents, on average, about one hundred and thirty-eight thousand people. When one considers that each delegate to this same body, on average, represents about one hundred and thirty-three thousand of the Empire State’s total population of twenty million, this would seem to be a perfectly reasonable arrangement. Just so, the rural 131^st District, comprising Ontario County and roughly half of Seneca County, contains something on the order of one hundred and thirty-two thousand people, while the 125^th District, encompassing all of Tompkins County and about one-fourth of Cortland County, contains around one hundred and sixteen thousand people. Clearly, the exact number of constituents per delegate can and does vary based on relative population density, but overall it would seem as though urban areas are represented on more or less equal footing with rural areas.

This has not always been the case, however. Prior to the 1960s, many states either required that legislative districts be drawn with equality of land area in mind as well as equality of population or simply neglected to redraw electoral district boundaries on anything approaching a regular basis. This prevalence of this tendency became painfully evident in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr (1962), a case brought by a resident of Shelby County, Tennessee named Charles Baker against the government thereof. According to the Constitution of Tennessee, the districts represented in the state assembly are to be redrawn every ten years so as to ensure that they each contain approximately the same number of people. By the early 1960s, however, as the aforementioned Mr. Baker had discovered, the relevant districts had not been redrawn since 1901, resulting in a high degree of malapportionment between various urban and rural areas. According to the Census of 1900, Shelby County contained approximately one hundred and fifty thousand people, at which point its representation in the state assembly was set. Some sixty years later, however, with county seat Memphis having become a major regional center of commerce and industry and the population having expanded to over six hundred thousand, the relevant Shelby County district still enjoyed the same representation as neighboring rural districts with only one-tenth the inhabitants. In asking for relief by way of a lawsuit, what Baker was essentially arguing that cases involving legislative malapportionment ought to be capable of being remedied by the courts. The State of Tennessee disagreed with this contention, holding instead that such questions were strictly political in nature, the result of which was that the Baker case eventually found its way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Ruling 6-2 in Baker’s favor, the Court ultimately found that cases of malapportionment in fact could be remedied by the appropriate judicial authority, resulting in the establishment a new standard for the drawing of electoral districts – “one person, one vote” – and setting off a wave of reapportionment in the states over the course of the decade that followed. The scrutiny which this process consequently invited to the exact composition of the legislative districts of the various states unsurprisingly turned up more than its fair share of oddities and outrages. In Tennessee, for example, not only had Memphis become underrepresented in the state assembly as a result of population growth, but so too had Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga. At the same time – albeit somewhat more suspiciously – certain districts in the eastern portion of the state whose inhabitants had leaned toward the Republican Party since as far back as the Civil War were also found to be underrepresented compared to their counterparts in the central and western thirds of the state. The result was that the rural residents of a little less than two-thirds of the rural Tennessee held a functional monopoly on political power in spite of being in the minority in terms of the overall population.

Connecticut had apparently witnessed a similar drift towards malapportionment over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, principally as a result of the terms of its 1818 constitution. According to the relevant provisions of the document in question, each town was to have at least one representative in the state assembly at the same time that no town was permitted to claim the right to more than two. In consequence, as the state industrialized and certain specific towns became home to textile mills that attracted increasingly large workforces from the surrounding countryside, the balance of power between urban and rural voters began to shift decisively in favor of the latter. By the early 1960s, the Republican Party had come to dominate state politics by way of its popularity among the residents of the state’s many small towns, each of which possessed at least one seat in the state assembly, while Democrats were mostly confined to a handful of large cities like Hartford and New Haven, none of which, regardless of their comparatively large populations, could claim more than two seats in the state assembly. 

On the other side of the country, California was revealed to contain one of the most egregious examples of deliberate malapportionment in the whole of the American republic. At some point in the 1920s, Californians had approved a scheme of legislative representation whereby seats in the lower house of the state assembly were drawn according to population while seats in the upper house were drawn with particular attention to existing county boundaries. Specifically, no county was to be divided up for the purpose of representation unless it was to be split equally into multiple districts with one seat each and no more than three counties were to be merged in order to form a single district. The intention of such a scheme, it seemed, was mainly to prevent the rapidly growing Los Angeles County – already the hub of the nation’s burgeoning film industry and containing some forty percent of the state’s total population – from becoming the single dominant force within the state’s complex internal power dynamics. The result, by the early 1960s, was an almost comical imbalance within the state senate between the numerous seats representing small, rural counties – the smallest of which, Alpine County, had less than three hundred permanent residents – and the single seat representing the expansive City and County of Los Angeles – the total population of which, circa 1960, was something on the order of six million. 

Returning back to New York for one final example, one finds a similar case – if somewhat less extreme in its outcome – of competition for influence between urban and rural interests resulting in the emergence of an extremely lopsided power structure. In 1894, in the midst of an era of Democratic Party dominance within a rapidly growing New York City, a convention was called for the purpose of rewriting the Empire State’s constitution. But while such occurrences were far from uncommon – conventions had previously met and approved amendments in 1801, 1821, 1846, 1867, and 1872 – the outcome of this specific meeting was far from what one might describe as customary. As the state had, since its most recent legislative apportionment, increased significantly in population, the assembled delegates naturally set about adding to the number of seats in both the upper and lower houses of the New York State Legislature. The state senate, specifically, was increased in size from thirty-two seats to fifty while the state assembly was expanded from one hundred and twenty-eight seats to one hundred and fifty. Notwithstanding the fact that much of the aforementioned population growth had been concentrated in New York City, however – or indeed, exactly because of it – a coalition of upstate Republicans conspired with a group of rural Democrats to ensure that New York City received fewer of these new seats than its population would otherwise have indicated. A deal was even struck with the city’s few Republican delegates to gerrymander a handful of safe seats for them in exchange for their cooperation. The result – approved by the people in a referendum vote by a margin in the tens of thousands – was the calculated disenfranchisement of New York City voters for a period extending for several decades.

            What this all amounts to, of course, is that for a significant period from the beginning of the 19^th century through at least the 1960s, many – perhaps even most – state assemblies in the American republic gave far too much weight to rural populations and far too little to their urban-dwelling counterparts. In some cases, to be sure, this was entirely accidental. In Connecticut and Tennessee, legislative districts had been drawn most recently at some point in the 19^th century, leading to significant imbalances as, over the course of the 20^th century, what had been small county towns expanded tremendously under the influence of industrialization and its accompanying labor draw. In other cases, however, such imbalances were quite intentional. As in California and New York, rural interests sometimes conspired to minimize the political power otherwise conferred on growing urban centers by drafting and enforcing redistricting rules that underrepresented urban voters at the behest of a number of comparatively small rural communities. As the assembled members of the United States Senate set about considering the mechanism by which the repeal of the 18^th Amendment might properly have been accomplished in January and February of 1933, the sad truth of such developments doubtless flashed through their minds. Many of these same men having risen to positions of national prominence by way of service in state government, they doubtless possessed firsthand knowledge of just how skewed state power structures could be in favor of rural over urban populations. Their choice, therefore, between allowing the state assemblies to ratify whatever draft amendment they managed to approve or else granting that same privilege to special conventions summoned for that purpose was surely known to them to in fact be a choice between allowing either rural interests or urban interests to determine the fate of the 18^th Amendment.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXXVIII: “As Long as We Take Up These Extraneous Matters We Can Not Do a Thing for the Distress of the Country”

    The exact means by which Prohibition would end was most definitely on the minds of the lawmakers of the 72^nd Congress who assembled for their lame-duck session in late November of 1932. Either they could proceed to other business and allow the overwhelmingly pro-repeal 73^rd Congress to address the fate of the 18^th Amendment however its members saw fit, or they could cobble together some kind of workable coalition and fashion a package of reforms that would please the sitting Wets without necessarily sidelining the remaining Drys. Unsurprisingly, it took little time for the leadership in both chambers to conclude that the latter course was preferable. This still didn’t clear the way for a speedy resolution, however, as the aforementioned Speaker Garner was very soon to learn. An avowed Wet, Garner was understandably eager to proceed to a vote on some manner of reform proposal as soon as the House was fully assembled. He accordingly chose to dispense with standard procedure – by which terms the Speaker did not actively propose legislation – and put forward his own version of a repeal bill on November 29^th. Unfortunately, in evident response to the Speaker’s enthusiasm, the proposal in question was rejected by the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of 13-6. The bill itself still made it to the House floor, but Democratic whips predicted a final tally of only 275 in favor, twelve votes short of the required two-thirds majority. In fact, the vote on December 6^th turned up an even worse result, with the “ayes” clocking in at only 272. Almost eighty former Drys had opted to change their tune and vote for repeal, but to no avail. Garner’s response to this rejection of his uncommon expression of initiative was to declare that the Prohibition issue was dead as far as the 72^nd Congress was concerned. Certain of his colleagues in the House later avowed that this was not for any lack of basic agreement. As Pennsylvania Republican James M. Beck (1861-1936) notably observed, House members at that time were less inclined to reject a repeal motion out of hand as they were affronted by Garner’s apparent attempt to badger them into action.    

    In any case, the House reacted to this rapid rejection of a wholesale repeal bill by then shifting its attention to a series of bills intended to amend the terms of the Volstead Act so as to allow for the sale and manufacture of low-alcohol bear and wine. It was a consolation, to be sure; an attempt to scrape up some kind of achievement from amidst the wreckage of a more ambitious proposal. But whereas Garner was perhaps too ready to abandon his desired objective after a single – admittedly bitter – rebuke, certain of his colleagues in the Senate were not so ready to give up hope. Indeed, the very next day, on December 6^th, 1932, Republican Senator John J. Blaine of Wisconsin (1876-1934) introduced the text of a joint resolution which would have modified the 18^th Amendment so as to allow individual states to determine whether or not to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages within their respective jurisdictions. Initially a straight copy of the earlier Bingham proposal, the Blaine proposal was subsequently amended during its passage through the Senate Judiciary Committee and favorably reported out to the Senate floor on January 5^th, 1933. Thus altered, the proposal amendment would now grant Congress the concurrent power – alongside that of the states – to regulate or prohibit the consumption of intoxicating beverage in certain specific venues while also explicitly calling for ratification by the legislatures of the various states. As this represented a significant alteration to the terms originally proposed by Senator Bingham back in December of 1931 – particularly as it left the final fate of any repeal attempt in the hands of the generally Dry-supporting state assemblies – many Wets in the Senate understandably cried foul. Notwithstanding these objections, however, the resolution proceeded to the Senate floor. At which point, on February 14^th, the inevitable finally occurred: a group of the Senate’s remaining Drys began a filibuster of the draft amendment.

    In fairness, the term “group” is something of a misnomer in this instance. In point of fact, the filibuster was sustained by a single Senator, one Morris Sheppard of Texas (1875-1941). Something of a progressive – albeit one who still believed in racial segregation – Sheppard had either authored or supported many notable pieces of legislation during his thirty years of service in Congress between 1902 and the first months of 1933, including child labor laws, antitrust laws, and laws which extended the electoral franchise. Perhaps most notable of all, however, was his status as one of the most fervent Drys in the whole of the United States Congress. Not only had he authored or co-authored a series of laws which, between 1913 and 1916, laid the groundwork for Prohibition, but he personally introduced the Senate resolution which eventually became the 18^th Amendment in 1917 and helped to draft the enforcing Volstead Act in 1919. Prohibition, one might reasonably conclude, was very close to Sheppard’s heart. And as it appeared as though said policy was on the brink of being dismantled, the Senator from Texas quite understandably sprang into action to save it. His weapon of choice being the filibuster – the purpose of which is to hold the floor until such time as the legislation being debated is withdrawn or two-thirds of those assembled vote for cloture – Sheppard was in need of some manner of material to read aloud. Ultimately, he settled upon a report on the work of the League of Nations conducted between July 24^th and September 30^th, 1922, a document simultaneously so irrelevant to those assembled – the United States having neglected even to join the League – and so mind-numbingly bureaucratic as to drive even the most unimaginative Senator into a state of boredom-induced unconsciousness. “I feel justified in fighting this motion with every weapon at my command,” Sheppard stated at the time, whereupon he proceeded with his soporific recitation.

    What followed was an oration which lasted nearly eight hours in total, and during which time Senator Shepperd politely but firmly rejected all requests that he stand down. When asked by New Hampshire Republican – and Senate President pro tempore – George H. Moses (1869-1944), for example, why he insisted on reading the entire League report into the record at 10:00 pm on a Tuesday, Sheppard simply responded that if he opted not to continue, the chamber would go into recess until the following day. When Moses then asked why Sheppard could not continue with whatever he was doing the following day, Sheppard’s similarly taciturn response was to declare that, “I wish to finish to-night, if I can.” Sometime later, after a further exchange between Sheppard and Moses – the latter of whom, as a former ambassador stationed in Greece and Montenegro, seemed to delight in asking very specific questions about the activities of the League in those nations – the Senator from Texas then yielded for a question from Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings (1890-1961). Evidently somewhat less amused by Sheppard’s “learned disquisition” than his colleague from New Hampshire, Tydings then proceeded to rather pointedly remind his fellow partisan from Texas of the stakes which he believed the American republic was then facing. “We have only 16 legislative days left of this Congress [,]” he avowed,

That there are 12,000,000 people out of employment, 5,000 banks have failed, there is economic chaos from one end of the Nation to the other, and as long as we take up these extraneous matters we can not do a thing for the distress of the country.

When Sheppard responded to this very trenchant observation by once more simply asserting that, “The country will also be frightfully injured if the liquor traffic is ever restored [,]” Tydings sought a second opportunity to speak, during which time he made his point more forcefully still. While the Senator from Maryland was, by his own admission, struck by the, “Sincerity and idealistic motives of the Senator from Texas [,]” he nevertheless felt the need to point out,

This is not a question of whether we shall have liquor or no. liquor. This is a question as to whether or not the American people have a right to pass upon the form of government under which they live. They can either adopt it or reject it; but the Senator from Texas, by the very long oration he is delivering – which has now gone on for an hour and a half and promises to go for at least another hour and a half – is denying to the people of America the right to alter or amend the form of government under which they live.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sheppard remained unmoved. “This motion [,]” he said, “is a step toward the return of the liquor traffic. I am fighting it at every step, and I feel justified in doing so.”

    Such was the essential dynamic of the next several hours. Time and again, Sheppard’s colleagues sought to challenges his conviction to both stand in the way of the business of Congress and obstruct the process by which the American people altered their system of government, and on each and every such occasion, Sheppard firmly declined to be budged. By his own admission, while,

Ordinarily, I am in favor of the submission of any question when a substantial number of the people desire the question submitted […] National prohibition […] was adopted by the States in 1920, only 13 years ago. Powerful wet minorities have not permitted it to have a fair trial. That is why I am not in favor of submitting now the question of its repeal. It would be unfair to prohibition and to the people to submit the question at this time.

Evidently, it was up to the Senator from Texas to decide whether it was entirely “fair” of the American people to change their minds on certain policy matters. If it had been twenty years instead of thirteen since the enactment of Prohibition, would he have been as adamant that the regime had not been granted its due? Given the man’s obvious sense of hubris, one fairly wonders whether any length of time would have satisfied him. Plain and simple, he was in favor of Prohibition, and was willing to stand in the way of his countrymen indefinitely unless they gave way to his views on the matter. This obstinance, particularly in the face of an ongoing economic crisis that continually demanded to be addressed, was doubtless infuriating to many of Sheppard’s colleagues in the Senate. And, quite predictably, this is what led to his ultimate undoing.

    Indeed, perhaps more galling than Sheppard’s desire to prevent a vote on Blaine’s aforementioned resolution was his insistence, when confronted, that he was doing nothing of the sort. Consider, to that end, the following exchange. Over eight hours into his intentionally obfuscatory oration, Senator Sheppard was asked pointedly by South Carolina Democrat James F. Byrnes (1882-1972) when, in his opinion, “the United States Senate will vote on the Blaine resolution?” When Sheppard answered – with characteristic reserve – that he was sure, “it will vote some time tomorrow [,]” Byrnes responded by seeking further assurance that Sheppard would not seek to delay that outcome as well. “As far as the Senator from Texas is concerned,” he said, addressing the chair in accordance with parliamentary procedure, “will he say that he will not seek to prevent a vote on the resolution to-morrow?” Notwithstanding his actions during the eight hours immediately preceding, Sheppard flatly replied that, “I am not seeking to prevent a vote.” When Senator Byrnes then pressed further, in effect seeking a promise from his colleague from Texas that, “after this night he will do nothing to prevent a vote [,]” Sheppard once more responded with outright denial. “I am not making an effort now to prevent a vote [,]” he said. “I am simply making a speech on a very important subject.” This, recall, was in spite of the fact that Sheppard had said some hours previously on the subject of the pending resolution that, “I am fighting it at every step, and I feel justified in doing so.” Such blatant insincerity – combined with the damage which he was willfully doing to the ability of the Unitec States Congress to address the nation’s ailing economic condition – was evidently too much for his colleagues to bear any longer. After a little more pointed badgering by the aforementioned Senator Moses, Sheppard was finally forced to acknowledge that the chamber had turned decisively against him. Asked, once more, to answer a series of deliberately obscure and technical questions by the former diplomat from New Hampshire, the Senator from Texas surrendered the floor and allowed Oregon Republican Charles McNary (1874-1944) to ask the unanimous consent of those present to schedule a vote on the Blaine resolution for one o’clock the following afternoon. Hearing no objections, the chair ruled that it was so ordered. The way forward was finally clear.

    Over the next two days, the Senate accordingly proceeded to a substantial discussion of the merits of Senator Blaine’s proposal. Several amendments were put forward, some successful, some not. Arkansas Democrat Joseph Robinson (1872-1937), for one, pointedly requested that the section of Blaine’s draft resolution requiring that the proposed amendment be considered by the legislatures of the various states be replaced by a clause which returned said responsibility to conventions specially summoned for that purpose. After a lengthy debate – during which the assembled Senators discussed both the legal implications and the practical concerns inherent in such an untested approach to ratification – a vote was finally held and the motion was carried, 45-15. Shortly thereafter, Robinson then moved for a second amendment which would have stripped out the section of the original Blaine proposal providing for concurrent authority on the part of the federal government and the states to regulate the sale and consumption of intoxicating beverages. Such overlapping responsibility, a number of Senators observed accordingly, was sure to prove unsustainable if ever tested in the slightest, particularly as it would offer the sanction of the Constitution to potentially contradictory statutes. In consequence of such arguments – and by a narrow margin of 33-32 – this amendment was carried as well. The appropriate details having thus been settled, the full resolution was at last put to a vote on February 16^th, 1933.

    This being the United States Senate, of course – in which every member tends to think themselves not only a great orator but one of the universe’s supreme arbiters of what is right and what is wrong – the assembled lawmakers could not simply proceed to the business at hand. First, every Senator who cared to do so had to add to the record an excerpt of their personal philosophy concerning the 18^th Amendment, Prohibition, saloons, and the general state of American public morality as of the early 1930s. Once this far from insignificant task had been accomplished, those few remaining Senators who were somehow still convinced that they might carry the day rather than their colleague Mr. Blaine then had to attempt to rally their fellow legislators around some manner of alternate or modified proposal. In this instance, it was Virginia Democrat Carter Glass (1858-1946) who came forward with the most substantial substitution, offering to put in place of Blaine’s Senate Resolution 211 his own Senate Resolution 202. Under the terms thereof, the 18^th Amendment would be still repealed, but the consumption of intoxicating beverages on the same premises where they were sold would be prohibited and Congress and the states would exercise concurrent authority over the enforcement of the same. Effectively an attempt by Glass to both reverse the previous day’s deletion of the “concurrent authority” clause of Blaine’s original proposal and prevent the reemergence of the neighborhood saloons whose ubiquity during the previous century had so animated temperance activists in the first place, this eleventh-hour attempt at a rather clumsy bait and switch ultimately went down to failure by a margin of 46-38.

    Following a further failed attempt by Pennsylvania Republican David Reed (1880-1953) to once more reinstate the “concurrent authority” clause, the vote on Senate Resolution 211 was then, at long last, called. The roll was heard, the yeas and nays were recorded, and the final count was announced. One week after it was reported out of committee and two days after Senator Sheppard’s attempted filibuster, the Senate had finally voted to adopt a resolution which would, if approved by the American people, bring about the repeal of the 18^th Amendment. The tally of votes, as recorded, was 63-23, five more than was necessary to reach the required two-thirds threshold. In a final send-off to the proposal – and a more than fitting coda to the events of the 14^th – Massachusetts Democrat David Walsh (1872-1947) then sought to add to the record a of encomium of sorts to the aforementioned Senator Sheppard. Though he had spent the better part of an entire working day attempting to stop his colleagues from submitting the repeal of the 18^th Amendment to the wisdom of the American people, Walsh attempted to remind his compatriots that in 1917, when the resolution that went on to become the 18^th Amendment was under debate in the Senate, Sheppard had famously declared that, 

The Members of Congress who will not vote for the submission of a constitutional amendment to the decision of the States, where it belongs, unless he personally believes it should become a part of the Constitution, usurps the function of the States, arrogates to himself and the Federal Government a prerogative that belongs to the States, and violates the very essence of their sovereignty.

When, at that moment, Sheppard reentered the Senate chamber, however, his response to having his own words spoken back to him could not reasonably be describes as being particularly gracious. Though his filibuster had been defeated, and though the relevant resolution had been overwhelmingly approved, the gentleman from Texas remained self-righteous to the last. “I referred to the statement to which he alluded in my speech on January 16 last, the thirteenth anniversary of prohibition,” he declared,  

And said that I did not believe that statement a precedent for action under the present circumstances. I do not believe that prohibition has had a fair trial and I do not think it should be submitted at this time. It would be unfair both to prohibition and to the people to do so.

Such is the nature, it would seem, of the Senate and of Senators. Everyone believes themselves the sole judge of right and wrong and everyone will seek to affirm this fact even in the face of defeat.   

    There remained, of course, the little matter of obtaining the approval of the House. Fortunately, the progress of Senate Resolution 211 was being closely watched by the legislators working at the other side of the Capitol. Indeed, the Democratic leadership had been poised to spring into action for some days prior to the February 16^th. To that end, House Majority Leader Henry T. Rainey (1860-1934) and the newly re-energized Speaker Garner had between them already agreed to pursue a suspension of the rules in order to secure as speedy a vote as possible. When, on February 20^th, Rainey asked for his suspension, Garner accordingly granted it, thereby limiting debate on the measure to a total of twenty minutes. This having been accomplished, a vote was quickly held and the resolution was resoundingly adopted, 289-121. The Secretary of State, one Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950), thereafter acknowledged receipt of the proposed amendment and swiftly set about advising the states of the need to ready conventions for the purpose of ratification. Less than two weeks later, the 72^nd Congress adjourned for the last time, having completed the task which many of its leaders had initially thought impossible. Both chambers had voted, in the face of delays, obstacles, and reverses, to submit a constitutional amendment to the American people proposing the repeal of Prohibition. And so, for the first time ever, as the spring of 1933 began in earnest, these same people began to assemble so as to make their voices heard. 

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXXVII: “Nevertheless, We’re for It”

    The Prohibition question, among others, served to aminate conversations that took place within both of the nation’s two mainstream political parties as they each felt out their respective electoral possibilities going into 1932. Incumbent Herbert Hoover had previously avowed his strong support for Prohibition during his first campaign for the presidency in 1928. The resulting regulatory regime was not perfect, he freely admitted at the time, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the basic concept wasn’t valid. In an effort to address the relevant flaws, a victorious Hoover accordingly authorized the formation of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in May of 1929, to be led by former Attorney General George Woodward Wickersham (1858-1936). Under Wickersham’s leadership, the commission concentrated mainly on surveying Prohibition enforcement tactics, collecting statistics on the illegal sale and manufacture of alcohol, investigating police behavior as concerned suspected bootleggers and smugglers, and generally taking the pulse of the American public on subject the 18^th Amendment. But while Hoover’s stated intention was to use the data gathered by the commissioners to formulate a series of reforms by which Prohibition might be strengthened and its flaws systematically addressed, the findings which resulted left a great deal to be desired. Published in January of 1931 as the Wickersham Report, the committee’s conclusion, after two years, was that Prohibition wasn’t working. Police, by and large, were either corrupt, inept, or unnecessarily brutal in their approach while local politicians were being bought and sold with alarming frequency, communities were being torn apart, and respect for federal authority was actively on the decline. Committee member and Louisiana trial attorney Monte Lemann (1884-1959) concluded accordingly that the whole scheme was unworkable and that there seemed to be, “No alternative but repeal of the Amendment.”

    Lemann, unfortunately, was the only one among his contemporaries to arrive at this conclusion. As far as the full committee was concerned, law enforcement was principally at fault, having failed to pursue criminals as aggressively as they should have. Having already sided with the “Drys” in his party, Hoover naturally endorsed this recommendation and thereafter refused to consider any potential modifications to the Volstead Act, let alone the full repeal of the 18^th Amendment. As he maintained this stance heading into 1932, however, the Wickersham Report quickly became something of a national joke. While ostensibly commissioned for the purpose of gathering statistical information and formulating policy recommendations based on the same, Wickersham and his subordinates had instead produced an exceptionally contradictory document which did little more than expose the ideological predilections of its members. Having seemingly decided in advance that Prohibition was a public good worth pursuing, the committee members appeared to ignore all evidence to the contrary, instead coming to the patently nonsensical conclusion that something which a decade of practical experience had made clear was impossible was actually perfectly achievable if the actors involved just tried harder. Syndicated columnists and political commentators were quick to pick up in the inherent absurdity of this position, with Algonquin Round Table member Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960) famously penning a satirical poem for the New York World in which he summarized the committee’s conclusions in a series of contradictory statements set to rhyme. “Prohibition is an awful flop/We like it,” the short piece opened,

It can't stop what it's meant to stop.

We like it.

It's left a trail of graft and slime

It don't prohibit worth a dime

It's filled our land with vice and crime,

Nevertheless, we're for it.

Plainly, regardless of what the Hoover Administration or any commission it happened authorized had to say to the contrary, the American people were not in the mood to be told that Prohibition could and should be salvaged.

    Being deeply and necessarily concerned with the changing tides of public opinion, Congress was also moved to respond to the publication of the Wickersham Report during its mandated annual session beginning in December of 1931. Whereas previously, during the 71^st Congress, uniform Dry support among Republicans had combined with a handful of Prohibition-supporting Democrats to keep any discussion of repealing or modifying the 18^th Amendment safely off either chamber’s docket, the slim majority assembled by the Democrats in the House in the aftermath of the 1930 mid-terms created an opportunity for the lower house’s previously stymied “Wet” faction to begun moving legislation out of committee and onto the floor. What followed was a complex series of moves and countermoves, negotiations and parliamentary ploys as various individuals and small groupings attempted to propose and promote the passage of over a dozen different bills that aimed to modify the Volstead Act, modify the 18^th Amendment, or eliminate Prohibition entirely. The most notable among these was proposed by Connecticut Republican Senator Hiram Bingham (1875-1956), who called for the full repeal of the 18^th Amendment by way of a series of state conventions. Prohibition, it seemed, was still popular with state lawmakers, leading congressional Wets to instead favor this more populist form of ratification. But while Bingham’s proposal was ultimately defeated by a margin of 55-15, the fact that the vote was held at all nevertheless marked a victory for Prohibition’s enemies. For the first time since Congress had passed the Volstead Act in 1919, a proposal touching upon the 18^th Amendment had actually made it to the Senate floor.

    Seeking to capitalize on their newfound strength, the Wets in Congress spent the next several months attempting to force a second vote on Prohibition before the annual session wrapped in July and preparations for the looming presidential election completely took over the political calendar. The result was another series of back-and-forth maneuvers as the Wet faction and the Dry faction in each of the two chambers proposed legislation, pursued discharge petitions, and jockeyed for position on various committees. The Wets received a tremendous boost in February when one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, came out publicly in favor of repealing the 18^th Amendment. With Roosevelt thus joining his fellow frontrunner, former Democratic nominee Al Smith (1873-1944), as favoring an end to Prohibition – and with Republican prospects at the polls looking utterly dismal – it now seemed only to be a matter of time. In the interim, however, matters still proceeded somewhat haltingly. Repeated attempts to force bills proposing to re-legalize the sale of beer onto the floor by way of discharge petitions failed time and again despite increasing Wet support in the House, while in the Senate, unfavorable reporting by the Manufactures Committee resulted in a failed vote on a four percent beer bill on April 19^th. Twenty-four votes, it turned out, was not enough to eke out a victory. All the same, compared to their previous margin of fifteen votes on Senator Bingham’s proposal, the Wets were nevertheless making steady progress against their opponents. And though the next House bill to make it out of committee was likewise defeated in May – leaving Prohibition the supreme law of the land until Congress next convened in November – the political tide had nevertheless turned decisively in favor of repeal.

    The general character of the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, both held in the summer of 1932, gave ample evidence to this shift in attitude among the nation’s political powerbrokers. For the first time since the 18^th Amendment had been ratified, the majority of the delegates attending the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June were in favor of repeal. President Hoover was not, of course, and his path to the nomination remained clear of potential obstacles. The result was something of a half-hearted compromise. Eager to ensure that the meeting which was supposed to lead to his renomination did not descend into ideological soul-searching as the assembled Republicans took to questioning the strict financial orthodoxy with which the President had comported himself while in office, Hoover and his floor managers endeavored to gloss over or ignore any possible expressions of concern in exchange for a promise to revisit the practical application of the 18^th Amendment. The resulting party plank, however, was frustratingly vague, offering only to investigate ways to alter the terms of Prohibition so as to allow more freedom to the states in terms of enforcement. The federal government, it was stated plainly, would still maintain a degree of oversight, and any concrete reform that was ultimately put forward would go to the state legislatures rather than to special state conventions. But while the assembled Republicans, in the moment, were willing to accept this rather hazy pledge, public release of the party platform immediately after the convention adjourned led to widespread accusations of political cowardice. The nation’s sincerest Drys were willing enough to offer their support, seeing in Hoover’s commitment to Prohibition their only chance to save their signature achievement from being consigned to the dustbin of history. But most Americans saw the compromise for exactly what it was. Namely, that Hoover was hedging his bets and dragging the Republican Party along with him.

    At the outset, at least, the Democratic National Convention played out much like the corresponding meeting of that selfsame party’s chief rival. Having also assembled in Chicago in June, the gathered delegates were likewise overwhelmingly in favor of repealing the 18^th Amendment and had already more or less agreed on who their nominee was going to be. No single candidate exercised as much control over the proceedings as Hoover while convening with his fellow Republicans, of course. Former Democratic nominee Al Smith of New York and Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas (1868-1967) both presented strong challenges to the clear frontrunner. But in the end, after four ballots, the aforementioned Governor Roosevelt emerged victorious. And unlike his Republican counterpart, he made clear his support for the complete repeal of the 18^th Amendment. Indeed, he not only made seeking this outcome a plank of the party’s platform for 1932, but also promised that the mechanism for seeking repeal would be specially-convened state conventions – as noted in the Bigham proposal – and that states wishing to remain officially dry would be permitted to do so at their discretion. In the campaign that followed, Roosevelt accordingly folded the dismantling of Prohibition into his “New Deal” program of financial, legal, and political reform by which he pledged to ameliorate the worst effects of the Great Depression and generally ease the suffering of the American people as a whole.

    Wets on both sides of the aisle in Congress were understandably elated by this development and sought to capitalize on the resulting groundswell of public support for repeal by pledging to advance another slate of reform proposals before the 72^nd Congress adjourned for the last time the following March. This effort was very much aided by the fact that Roosevelt’s declaration in favor of repeal had already begun influencing public attitudes and shifting the tenor of many down-ticket races. In the case of North Carolina Democrat Cameron Morrison (1869-1953), a noted and obdurate Dry, the increasing fervor around the prospect of actually bringing Prohibition to an end resulted in his defeat in the North Carolina Senate primary in favor of pro-repeal candidate Robert Reynolds (1884-1963). Doubtless also feeling pressure from his constituents – and eager to avoid the fate just suffered by Senator Morrison – Virginia Senator Carter Glass (1858-1946) shifted his public stance from Dry to Wet and began advocating in favor of repeal at around the same time. By October of 1932, less than a month before Election Day, surveys indicated that some eighty percent of the candidates running for seats in the House and Senate were avowedly in favor of eliminating Prohibition. Granted, the way was still not entirely clear for the forces of reform. The likely election of a mass of pro-repeal legislators did not necessarily change the minds of every Dry lawmaker still sitting in Congress at the end of 1932. The Senate still struggled to move forward with a renewed push in favor of the Bingham proposal while House Wets still had to resort to using discharge petitions to get their reform bills onto the floor. But with the arrival of Election Day, more than one hundred Dry legislators lost their seats in Congress. The result, come March 4^th, 1933, would be a supermajority in the House in favor of the repeal of the 18^th Amendment and a supermajority less three in favor of the same outcome in the Senate. Now, it truly was only a matter of time until Prohibition ended. A matter of time, yes, and a question of on whose terms it finally occurred. 

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXXVI: How Dry I Am

    The 21^st Amendment, for a number of reasons, remains unique within the pantheon of textual modifications to the Constitution. For one thing, it is one of a vanishingly small number of amendments – alongside the 13^th and the 26^th – to have been proposed and ratified both within the same calendar year and within one full year of its approval by Congress, namely between April 10^th and December 5^th, 1933. In terms of the latter, it progressed to ratification at about the same speed as its immediate predecessor, taking about eight months to reach the mandated three-fourths threshold. But whereas other amendments managed to achieve such a rapid pace while still appealing to the state legislatures for formal approval – and thus having to contend with state legislative timetables – the 21^st Amendment is thus far the only one of its kind – pursuant to the terms of Article V of the Constitution – to have been ratified by state conventions summoned for that purpose. Perhaps most notable of all, however, is its very simply stated purpose. The 21^st is the only amendment whose primary purpose, at the time of its proposal, was to invalidate an existing amendment to the Constitution. The amendment being invalidated was the aforementioned 18^th, the purpose of which, recall, was to prohibit, “The manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes.” If the 18^th Amendment, therefore, was effectively the Prohibition Amendment, then the 21^st could be fairly described as the Anti-Prohibition Amendment.   

    As a practical matter, of course, the prohibitory regime that the 18^th Amendment inaugurated never really functioned as its supporters originally intended. The culmination of decades of grassroots organization and lobbying on the part of dozens of pressure groups and countless high-minded activists, a federal ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages undeniably represented a tremendously impressive achievement. The “Drys” of the contemporary Temperance Movement had managed to transform themselves from a series of local lobby groups and social reformers into one of the most powerful non-partisan forces in contemporary American politics, and they remained exceptionally influential even after having secured their crowning achievement in 1920. But in terms of stopping people who wanted a drink from actually getting their hands on one, the 18^th Amendment and its enforcing legislation were truly a dismal failure. The problem, of course, was that the commodity being prohibited was something which had already been widely available – either by retail purchase or home manufacture – for several centuries as of the early 1920s and around which American culture had developed a whole host of habits and traditions. While it might have been politically expedient, therefore, on the part of public officials in 1918 to come out in favor of a federal ban on the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages – largely out of fear for the tremendous political pressure which the Drys would bring to bear otherwise – no constitutional amendment was going to stop Americans of all stripes from seeking to slake their thirst. The amendment seemed to anticipate this by failing to make consumption unconstitutional as well, but in so doing – doubtless out of a keen sense of the impossibility of universally policing private behavior – its authors effectively admitted that theirs was fundamentally a doomed errand.

    Indeed, at the outset – given adequate resources – it was relatively easy to circumvent the intended effects of the 18^th Amendment. As the text thereof made a point of explaining, its prohibitory measures would not take effect until, “After one year from the ratification of this article [.]” Since this allowed for a year-long grace period during which manufacture and sale would remain legal in all jurisdictions where it had not already been banned by the states, anyone concerned with their inability to get their hands on a drink thereafter was perfectly free to buy up as much surplus as they could afford and store it away for later consumption. In an attempt to meet the resulting demand – and doubtless to provide some cushion for the restructuring that was to follow – distillers and breweries also stepped-up production, their end goal being to make and to sell as much alcohol as possible while it still remained legal to do so. But while Americans of all income levels doubtless tried to take part in this sudden spate of hording, most of the nation’s legal liquor supply ended up in the hands of a wealthy few. As the aforementioned grace period eventually lapsed, however, and demand for drink remained high, a variety of new vectors emerged by which comparatively less fortunate Americans were able to wet their whistles at will.

    Rum-running was perhaps the most obvious means by which certain enterprising citizens sought to get their hands on intoxicating liquors. While the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was no longer legal in the United States after January of 1920, it remained perfectly permissible in neighboring Mexico and Canada, the result of which was an increase of production in those countries accompanied by the rapid emergence of a vast network of alcohol-trafficking smugglers. Given the often exceptionally rugged terrain which continues to characterize much of the American republic’s northern and southern border regions, the close connections which also continue to exist between certain border communities, and the sheer number of ports of entry in the continental United States, the overall success of such endeavors was almost guaranteed to be quite high, especially if the aforementioned smugglers sought out the right distributors and very deliberately invested their profits. As for the former, organized crime made for a blindingly obvious solution. Not only were organizations that already did business in areas like prostitution and illegal gambling in need of a steady supply of intoxicating beverages in order to keep the customers of their existing venues in the proper state of mind, but they were also already possessed of the resources, wherewithal, and political connections to ensure that whatever alcohol actually made it into the country was properly transported and stored with minimal law enforcement interference. And as for the latter, of course, it didn’t take a genius to conclude that customs agents and border guards being paid government wages could be made to forget just about anything if appropriately compensated for their trouble. An honest man, to be sure, might foul up the works now and then. But even if that meant the sacrifice of perhaps one shipment in fifty, the sheer amount of profit to be made would more than offset the occasional loss.

    If demand remained higher than smuggling alone could supply, of course, one could always resort to manufacturing alcohol domestically. This would be illegal, naturally, and require its own share of thoughtful precautions. Running unlicensed distilleries and/or brewing operations would naturally call for a staff of experienced chemists and technicians, not to mention access to the proper equipment, facilities, raw materials, and transportation. Protecting the resulting enterprise from either rivals or government scrutiny would also seem to necessitate the hiring of drivers, guards, and lookouts, as well as a small handful of individuals willing to shoot, or be shot at by, people looking to threaten their livelihoods. Provided such thing could be secured, however, and costs kept as low as possible, there would still remain a tremendous profit ceiling notwithstanding the inherent dangers. Kept to a smaller scale, of course – for the purpose, say, of personal consumption rather than retail sale – many of the cited costs and hazards would fall away. Particularly adept members of the nation’s business community sought to make this latter course as easy as possible by continuing to actively sell many of the basic ingredients necessary to manufacture alcohol at home. Mashbills, for example – being the mix of grains brewers and distillers combine with water and then heat prior to fermentation – were still perfectly legal to buy and sell, while companies like Fruit Industries Ltd. – a front for the California Vineyardist Association – made millions of dollars retailing fruit juice concentrates that could be very easily converted into cheap, potent wines. Eventually, the federal government attempted to restrict these practices as well, but not before millions of American succeeded in fulfilling their own personal desire for drink.

    At the bottom rung of the ladder – in terms of cost, prestige, and palatability – were the various “substitute alcohols” devised by the least well-heeled of America’s dedicated drinkers. The cheapest and most widely available was undoubtedly the “canned heat” product known as Sterno, a kind of jellified alcohol that could be ignited in its original container and used to heat chafing trays or buffet dishes. Strained through cheesecloth, muslin, or even an old sock, an alcoholic liquid could be extracted from canned Sterno which, when mixed with fruit juice, produced the beverage know as “squeeze.” Because the original product had been denatured, of course – through the addition of substances like pyridine or denatonium – squeeze was always poisonous, if not necessarily deadly. Worse off were those who sought a shorter route to intoxication by simply consuming the liquid alcohol still being made for industrial use. As an antiseptic, a basic fuel, and an essential component of most practical applications of organic chemistry, ethyl alcohol was never an intended target of the 18^th Amendment or the Volstead Act (1918) and continued to be manufactured in facilities across the United States. In order to ensure that the resulting output did not find its way into the hands of illicit retailers, however, the United States government also mandated that all commercial ethanol be purposely contaminated to make it either unpalatable or poisonous. At first, this took the form of a series of relatively mild additives which the chemists hired by the nation’s unlicensed manufacturers were able to easily remove. In response, the Treasury Department then demanded the addition of even more volatile substances, including the particularly hazardous combination of methanol, pyridine, and benzene commonly known as methyl alcohol. The result was predicably disastrous, with some ten thousand people dying and countless more suffering serious nerve damage over the course of the 1920s.

    The federal government took no responsibility for these deaths, of course, any more than it did for the emergence of the aforementioned smugglers, bootleggers, or their various criminal compatriots. And yet, in spite of this inflexible attitude towards what was plainly an unenforceable constitutional provision, hundreds of federal officials were themselves guilty of imbibing. As described by bootlegger George Cassidy (1892-1967) in a series of Washington Post articles published in the fall of 1930, numerous Congressmen and Senators had been receiving regular shipments of alcohol from men like him since almost the moment Prohibition came into force a decade prior. Indeed it was his estimation that some eighty percent of the present makeup of Congress drank on a regular basis notwithstanding their public positions. Once these kinds of statistics began to circulate, public attitudes began to change. With the Great Depression now in full swing, there was a clear and present need on the part of both the American people and their political representatives for some manner of straightforward and effective financial and psychological relief. Jobs were disappearing, farms were being foreclosed on, people’s savings were being wiped out, and still there seemed to be no end to it. But the President, citing principle, refused to offer his fellow Americans more than indirect assistance while agents of the federal government continued to pursue a demonstrably pointless war against the one vice that might have granted the suffering some modicum of solace.

    The 18^th Amendment had made the production and sale of alcohol unconstitutional, of course, but what had been the result of attempting to enforce this misguided provision? Year after year over the course of the 1920s, alcohol had entered the country illegally, had been manufactured illegally, and had been sold illegally, all thanks to the efforts of smugglers, bootleggers, and various other types of criminals who reaped tremendous profits and consequently strengthened their own ability to influence the nation’s political and judicial processes. And all the while, as the poorest Americans actively poisoned themselves or became the victims of organized crime, Senators and Congressmen reclining in their cloakrooms and offices and toasted themselves and each other with the finest alcohol the taxpayer money could afford. If this was the reality of Prohibition in the United States – if hypocrisy and death was to be the legacy of the movement for temperance – then why not just repeal the damn thing and let the chips fall where they may? Not only could the American people – circa 1930 – really use a little self-medication, but the tax revenues to be levied from the renewed sales of alcohol would doubtless go a significant distance towards lessening the spiraling crisis within which the nation seemed to be trapped. And once the various breweries, and distilleries, and dedicated drinking establishments began to reopen, thousands of jobs would be created from coast to coast. Indeed, upon reflection, there seemed to be few downsides to repeal at all. Naturally, the Drys would disagree with having the measure that they had worked for generations to see implemented torn down after only a decade. And in certain regions of the country, the pro-temperance lobby remained a formidable political force. But as disregard for the 18^th Amendment became more and more widespread amidst the rise to power and prominence of numerous domestic criminal cartels, more and more Americans had less and less reason to care. It was plain to any honest observer that Prohibition hadn’t worked. Was the federal government going to acknowledge this, or would it persist in its destructive hypocrisy?