Women carrying signs in Seattle during a Vote Dry march, circa 1916.
In 2006, each of the editorial writers at the Seattle Times was assigned a Sunday section front, which would take up an opinion piece twice as long as a regular column. I asked to do an historical piece, and ended up doing one on Prohibition. I wanted to make it as little about current events as possible, but I still had to relate it to something, so I chose the upcoming vote on the “four-foot rule.” That was a rule to ban “lap dances” at strip clubs, in which the “dancers” wiggled their butts in a man’s lap and sometimes massaged something they weren’t supposed to.
I was for allowing lap dances, though the piece I wrote had only one sentence about them. I was trying to make a bigger point about governmental nannyism. The piece ran in the Seattle Times on November 5, 2006, the Sunday before the election. It was titled, “The Evergreen Nanny.”
Little has changed since Washington’s first venture into ballot-box morality more than 90 years ago.
In 1914, the state’s first ballot initiative was placed before the voters of Washington. It was Initiative 3, and it promised to shut down all trade in alcoholic drinks.
On Tuesday, Seattle voters will decide the fate of the city’s strip joints. A year ago, it was public enjoyment of cigarettes and cigars. What next? In New Zealand, the humanity-loving progressives at the Ministry of Health are proposing to take junk food out of vending machines at private places of business. Maybe someone could collect signatures for a workplace junk-food ban and get it on the ballot in Seattle. A lot of people would vote for it: It’s for the public health.
We think we’ve evolved in this city, but the zeal with which we condemn our fellow citizens’ pursuit of happiness is as old as the ages. The arguments of today (and tomorrow, probably) contain the echoes of arguments made almost a century ago in the battle over alcoholic drink.
Initiative 3 promised to shut down the brewers, distillers and saloons. If it passed, people could still bring drinks into the state or make them at home. While not full-blown Prohibition, it was a step toward it, and everyone knew that.
People cared about Initiative 3. More Washingtonians voted on it than had voted two years earlier on the historic four-way presidential race between William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene Debs — or on any other race in the state’s history.
The battle over Initiative 3 pitted the “drys” against the “wets.” The central argument of the drys was moral. The drys argued that liquor was bad because it made men do bad things. What it made women do was not often said, but it was implied in such slogans as, “Where the saloon flourishes, the home withers.”
The moral argument spoke deeply to many people, but there was a problem with it. The generalizations about alcohol didn’t apply to everyone. Drinking alcohol, unlike some other transgressions, was obviously bad only when one did too much of it.
The wets argued that drink was a matter of individual judgment. The plain fact, wrote H.A. Chadwick, editor of the Argus, a Seattle weekly, was that some folks were “of weak mentality.” Their inadequacy was their problem, and the strong of mind should not be punished for it. Chadwick denounced Seattle’s dry mayor, George Cotterill, as “one of those men who would reform the world and cause all people to be good by force.”
If alcohol were made a personal-liberty issue, the drys would lose. Instead, they made it an issue of an evil industry, by demonizing the breweries, distilleries and saloons — much as anti-smoking advocates today do with Big Tobacco.
The Rev. Mark Matthews of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church roared, “The liquor traffic is the most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit … ,” and the open saloon was “manufacturing subjects to be sent back to hell.”
In obvious imitation of Abraham Lincoln, the tall, thin, dark-maned preacher cried, “The nation cannot exist half-drunk and half-sober.”
Matthews’ Seattle flock was the largest Presbyterian congregation in the world at the time. While his florid rhetoric is out of fashion these days, his argument is familiar enough: The demon is not he who drinks, but he who profits from it.
On the other side, Alden Blethen, the openly wet founder and publisher of the Seattle Times, offered $1,000 in gold — $28,000 today — to anyone who could show that Initiative 3 would stop people from drinking. He argued that Initiative 3 was anti-business. It would put out of work thousands of brewery and distillery workers, hops and barley farmers, all to the profit of industry in other states.
The labor movement was divided. The Wobblies and the socialists hated the saloon, because the worker with a beer in his hand would not revolt. But the brewery workers and bartenders represented by the more business-oriented American Federation of Labor would lose their jobs under Initiative 3.
There was also a populist argument for the saloon as “the working man’s club.” It was a place for men to discuss politics, religion and the travails of life over a frothy stein of beer. Many saloons offered workers a free lunch if they would only buy a drink.
The Washington State Federation of Labor came out against Initiative 3. So did the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
Business opposition to Initiative 3 was led by Judge Thomas Burke (whose name is on the Burke-Gilman Trail) and by Henry Broderick, Seattle’s most prominent real-estate man. They hired former Post-Intelligencer editor Erastus Brainerd, who fired off all sorts of torpedoes against Initiative 3, including the claim that it was poorly written, an argument heard today over such measures as property-rights Initiative 933. Brainerd claimed a ban on the sale of alcohol would also ban vanilla extract.
The core of the business argument against Initiative 3 was about money and jobs. This was not what most people cared about when they thought about liquor, but it was what business was most comfortable talking about.
The drys also made economic arguments. The result, printed in the Times on July 12, 1914, was a strange dispute about Kansas.
The Sunflower State had had Prohibition for 30 years. Because of this, asserted the Statewide Prohibition Committee of Washington, “Kansas has become the richest state per capita in the nation.”
“In Kansas, one farmer in five has an auto; in Missouri, one in one hundred,” the committee said.
Ban the sale of beer, it implied, and we’ll have a Model T in every garage. Furthermore, the committee said, in half of Kansas’ 105 counties, not one prisoner was in jail.
The wets hooted. The statistics were gaseous. Kansas was poorer than Washington. A lot of its counties were so hard up, Brainerd said, they didn’t have jails.
The two sides mustered up a lengthy talkfest about how many convicts there were in Kansas, how many juvenile delinquents, how many imbeciles in Kansas, and even the amount of bank deposits in that state.
That argument may have no modern counterpart.
The two sides also pitched arguments at women, who had been given the vote in Washington four years earlier. Speaking for the wets, Brainerd warned women that Initiative 3 would ban Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, a “women’s complaints” remedy that was 15 percent alcohol.
The drys reminded women that most drinking establishments would not admit children. “Will a woman vote for an institution that the law says is not a fit place for her child to enter?” one pamphlet said.
Both sides used the class argument. The wets argued that banning the saloon hurt the working man, and the drys argued that it benefited him.
The drys, noting the recent discovery that alcohol is a depressant, argued that liquor was a health issue. “The saloon,” they said, “slays its best friends.” The wets might have retorted that a glass of alcohol a day is good for your heart, but they didn’t know that in 1914.
The drys made the weird argument that grain was food, and that turning it into alcohol was a perversion of life. “Turn all the grain in the world into whiskey,” a dry pamphlet said, “and you could not feed a child with it.”
On Nov. 3, 1914, King County voted wet, but rural Washington swamped the city vote, the balance of power being more at equilibrium then, and Initiative 3 rolled to victory, 53 percent to 47 percent.
The initiative really was a step toward total prohibition. In 1917, the year President Wilson took the country into World War I, the Legislature voted Washington “bone dry.”
For 16 years, the people of Washington endured the state and federal bans. Most of them must have known within the first year that they had made a mistake. It took an extraordinary crime wave and a Depression, with governments crying for tax money, to undo the “great experiment.”
Of all the arguments earnest people made for bad policy, from the class arguments and business arguments to the moral arguments, only one has entered the history books. It was the most cynical argument and it was the correct one: that Prohibition would not work. People would disobey it, and the attempt to enforce it would debauch the law.
There is a limit to the amount of nannyism that people can stand. That may change from one generation to the next, but not by much.
© 2006 The Seattle Times
So I hoped. At least Seattle people agreed with me about the four-foot rule, which went down, 65 percent No, in the November 7, 2006, election.