The Ruin Prohibition Brought to Kansas

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The Ruin Prohibition Brought to Kansas

BY HENRY J. ALLEN. (ILLUSTRATED BY F. J. COOPER)

(From Collier's Weekly, Apr. 1, 1916. Reprinted in the Era by permission)

[So much has been said about Kansas prohibition and the danger it wrought to business and prosperity, that the following authentic ar- ticle from one who knows the conditions in Kansas should be an im- petus to the citizens of this state to bring Utah into similar danger at the next election. In answer to our request to reproduce it in the Era, the managing editor of Collier's Weekly, under date of April 17, said: "We gladly give you permission to reprint Henry J. Allen's article The Ruin Prohibition Brought to Kansas' in your paper, the Improve- mknt Era, provided credit be given Collier's in the headlines announc- ing the article. With best wishes for your campaign, Sincerely yours, The Managing Editor." Thanks to the editor, for his kindness and good wishes. We hope the readers of the Era will help to bring similar "ruin" to this state, by making Utah "dry" this fall. Editors.]

We observe from recent editorial comment in Collier's that the kindly hearted booze men of Montana have lined up to fight the proposed prohibition amendment in that state on the ground that prohibition will injure business in Montana. The propa- ganda of these business philanthropists will be full of interesting revelations. They doubtless will show their disinterestedness by explaining that more liquor is sold in a prohibition state than in a state where the saloons are, and that the increase in drunken- ness and crime is in direct proportion to the decrease of saloons. They will prove that putting the criminal ban upon liquor in Montana will destroy the business interests of the State, cause grass to grow in the streets of its cities, population to flee away, and human happiness to disappear. Also it will increase the consumption of liquor. They will repeat this frequently. They will prove all this and more by alluding to the fate of Kansas. Only recently they have sent out the statement that prohibi- tion ruined the grape industry in Kansas. The brewers, who made no wine of our table grapes, claim that in the eighties the grape industry "gave hope" of amounting to over $200,000 a year, and is estimated at less than $25,000 per year now. And the gloomy fact is that the grape industry was not the only one ruined by prohibition. There was the mint industry. Prohibition killed the mint julep, although mint had already made a good start in Kansas. Now there is no demand for it except in a few homes where they

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make it in sauce for spring-lamb dressing. Fields that might still

have been teeming with pretty and odoriferous mint now are given over to the sordid production of alfalfa. Then there was the blow to the egg industry. Men no longer use eggs for eggnog. When prohibition came the hens had been doing their best in their free, untutored way to keep the egg in- dustry alive, and you could get eggs for eight cents a dozen. Since prohibition put the eggnog out of business you have to pay two cents apiece for eggs. Prohibition seemed to take the very ambition out of the hens. They seem to feel that they have noth- ing to cackle about since the saloon has left us. Aman over in the eastern part of the state used to make roulette wheels. He was a fine cabinet-maker, and the wheels he turned out for roulette and other games of chance were mounted with ivory and mother-of-pearl. Prohibition killed that industry. Not two per cent of our people today would know a roulette wheel from a Russian Scheherazade if they'd meet it coming along the road. While the people of Kansas talk very little about this, being a reticent folk, it is generally realized that prohibition has killed in this state about every industry except the raising of wheat and corn and alfalfa and fruit and live stock potatoes and peas and ;

cabbage and "garden sass ;" chickens and ducks and geese and horses and mules. Almost immediately prohibition ruined our most prominent gamblers, blighted our beer gardens, and killed the bartenders' union. Prohibition has left very little of Kansas except the growing crops in her field, the stock in her stock pens, the dreary round of work, work, work in her factories and stores and other indus- tries. It has left us little to do in hours of leisure except just to fall in love, get married, send our children to school, go abroad occasionally, join the church when we feel like it, run into each other with expensive automobiles, and store our money away in dusty bank vaults instead of giving it to cheerful gentlemen with white aprons who used to stand in front of cut-glass bars and say occasionally: "This one is on the house." Where once the thriving business of the saloon sent the clamorous odor of its prosperity out upon the sidewalk and clear across the street, we find nothing but shoe stores, clothing stores, dry-goods stores, meat markets, grocery stores, and other sordid activities of an unhappy people. Where once you saw long lines of men on Saturday night going joyously into rooms where the doors always swung in, never out, where there was sawdust on the floor and a merry crowd standing before the mahogany top, where they were treat- ing all around, and a man could get his salary check cashed and spend it right there on his boon companions, and then go enthu-

698 IMPROVEMENT ERA siasticallyhome and break up the furniture and give his wife a black eye: instead of all the above manifestations of a care-free people which characterized the saloon day, we now have nothing but gloom. We see men going quietly into butcher shop or grocery store or department store to get their weekly salary checks cashed, and then proceeding moodily home with shoes for the children and beefsteak for supper and the fixings for a heavy Sunday dinner the next day, and you know instinctively that there will be no hilarity in that home that night, and nothing to cheer the lives of these people except such sober activities as mother may introduce into the family circle. HANDICAPS OF BOOZELESS YOUTH There is nothing for that family to look forward to except a comfortable Sunday dinner and maybe church in the morning and Sunday school, possibly a decorous ride around town in the family automobile in the afternoon, occasionally a thrill-less, sen- sation-less concert at the grand opera house in the evening with some person like Homer or Schumann-Heink imported at vast price for the program. Then Monday they begin the same round all over again and spend the next week doing nothing but working and playing and riding and eating and sleeping and buying new clothes and taking music lessons and going to parties and theatres and over-feeding each other at dinners, and during the live-long week father never comes home and breaks in the door with a war whoop and goes to smashing up the furniture, or caressing mother with his doubled-up fist, kicking little Tommy just to see him squirm, and doing other things to show the pride of strong manhood that used to be in him in the clays before prohibition came and killed every- thing in Kansas. Added to this ruin of the free, strong spirit which has fol- lowed the removal of what a man from Milwaukee has so poet- ically termed "the poor man's club" there is the ignorance — the besotted, benighted ignorance — which has followed the introduc- tion of the dry era. There are whole families of children in Kansas who never saw a saloon. Think of it ! Citizens of what we are fond of calling the most enlightened nation on earth so ignorant that if they should walk down Broadway tomorrow they would have to ask a policeman to tell them what the word saloon meant. We are now in the second generation of this form of ignor- ance in Kansas. What hope have we? What prospect have our young men for "getting on" in the world when they do not know what the word saloon means or what a drink of liquor tastes like? What hope have they of social success when they do not know what wines go with a fashionable dinner? What would

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one of them do if elected president? Think of the great of the past. Did any of them handicapped like this ever amount to anything? OUR BELOVED MISERIES As has been so carefully pointed out to us by the Unite 1 States Brewers' association, practically all of the great men of our past history drank liquor, not only because they liked it, but because there were no prohibition cranks in the land in those days to raise a fuss about it. No railroad president had then robbed his engineers and trainmen of their personal liberty by forbidding them to take a little for their stomach's sake while on duty. These are the somber reflections that come to one when he

nkeleton aired

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700 IMPROVEMENT ERA contemplates the effort to make all the country like Kansas — state where they are allowing the county poorhouses to crumble in decay, where the jails are running practically empty, and where the business of taking care of the poor has been largely ruined be- cause the poor will not live here any more. Last Christmas an effort to give usefulness to a "good fellow club" in Wichita, the commercial center of the state, failed because after the club was organized it found so little to do that it became discouraged and went out of business with a balance in the treasury. Can any sense of philanthropy be created in our citizenship without any poor to take care of? In God's great name, are we to be robbed of the opportunity to develop those tender sensi- bilities which grow only in the presence of need? Weare human we would enjoy the larger, more thrilling ;

life that comes in on the tide of drink; we would like our tene- ment districts, our social-welfare fights, our all-night courts, our white-slave problems, our commissions to study the relief of disease and poverty just as well as anyone — but can we have them? We cannot. There hasn't even been a case of delirium tremens in the state since 1896, and at the time that was thought by inex- perienced surgeons to be due to the free-silver campaign. How can we ever hope to become familiar with the evils of drunkenness when we have wiped out the taste for it in our state? How can we ever expect people to come here for real enjoy- ment when we have provided none of those ministrations of hap- piness that bubble along Broadway and have made French Lick Springs in Indiana such a heaven on earth? Then, too, we have driven out of Kansas a class that was very useful to us, that relieved us entirely of the responsibility of local government. In the day before the state went dry no one ever worried about who was to be alderman or chief of police or mayor. We knew that the saloon men would look after that — it was part of their business. They wielded the balance of power and the political bickerings which sometimes now enter into the selection of our local officers in Kansas were wholly unneces- sary in that old day. The saloon men got together and made up the ticket and got it elected. All we had to do was to pay the bills. Now heaven alone knows when a campaign opens who is going to be elected, and when he is elected he spends so much of his time worrying about the recall provisions of the charter that it spoils much of the pleasure and all of the profit which his old-

time predecessors used to get out of the job. With the example of Kansas being constantly pointed out by the liquor men, why will state after state rise up and kick these benefactors in the face in the ungrateful way they are now doing?