The Slaughter of The Innocents
Father Charles E. Coughlin (1891-1979) Social activist & friend of the working class, founder of the National Union of Social Justice. Fr. Coughlin has a regular radio show from 1926 to 1942 where he denounced the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
INTRODUCTION
In taking inventory of our national wealth the political economist points to the billions of dollars, the acres of factories, the thousands of square miles of productive farm land with which God has blessed our citizens.
The scientist reminds us of the manifold inventions which have leaped into being out of the genius of a Bell, a Marconi and an Edison. For him, these are the fundamentals of wealth.
But in its more careful analysis, neither the gold of the economist, nor the devisals of the inventor are to be compared in value to the pricelessness of the youth of America upon whom the foundations of future hopes and prosperity are builded.
It is possible to envision a prosperous and a courageous and happy America without either the gold of the banker or the machinery of the manufacturer. But it is impossible to preserve our civilization unless we preserve the sons and daughters of this present generation as respecters of the laws both of God and of country.
In a previous broadcast I had occasion to refer to the Eighteenth Amendment of our Constitution as a smoke screen which beclouded the vision of the people of our nation from the more substantial and pertinent issue which revolves around the question of labor conditions.
It is a coincident that the development of the ideas of prohibition and of mass production have been almost contemporaneous.
It is a peculiar coincident that no substantial headway was made towards national prohibition legislation until great capitalists began making generous contributions to the professional prohibition organizations. These contributions began to appear after the State and Federal Governments had dissolved the oil companies for violation of the antitrust laws - trusts that were dissolved by the decree of the United States Court as unlawful combinations in restraint of trade.
Fifty millions of dollars, according to the Anti-Saloon League’s own estimate - the greatest slush fund in the history of the Republic - passed through the organizations to finance dry legislation and propaganda.
It is a peculiar coincident that from the time that the prohibition smoke screen was raised, there was not a single prosecution of a trust; not another hostile legislative act by any State Legislature affecting the interests of great combinations of capital and industrial organizations.
There is also no doubt that many of the industrial leaders who contributed great sums of money to the prohibition cause and who sweat their men twelve hours a day in the steel mills believed that they could grind more work out of their employee by depriving them of their beer. But these same capitalists and industrialists took care to throw around their own well stocked cellars the protection of the law, and to have written into the legislative statutes certain loopholes under which the farmers who were to be depended upon to furnish the majority for dry Congressmen, were to be guaranteed their legal rights to make wines and cider in their homes.
Ladies and gentlemen, as I approach this subject of prohibition I wish to make it plain that I am neither a wet nor a dry. I am concerned only with cold, dismal, uncontrovertible facts supplied by the documents of our Federal Government. I am concerned with their presentation this evening for the single purpose of sketching a verbal portrait of the present conditions which are of our own making, and which we are bequeathing to the youth of America.
Thus, as an American citizen and as a Catholic priest who is vitally concerned in the maintenance of the American home, I approach this subject.
THE QUESTION
In a campaign speech at Elizabethton, Tennessee, October 7, 1928, President Hoover has gone on record as saying that: “The purpose of the Eighteenth Amendment is to protect the American home . . . I wish it to succeed.”
Keeping this statement of our great prohibition President in mind and using only facts which cannot be denied insofar as they are official documents, has the Eighteenth Amendment protected the American home?
Let us determine whether it has preserved that respect for law and authority in our nation, which before its adoption, was taught to the American children at their mothers’ knees. Has it elevated the morality of our youth? Has it eradicated crime? Has it emptied our prisons and our jails?
WHY PROHIBITION?
The advocates of prohibition promised that all these questions would be answered in the affirmative. Their most powerful plea for the adoption of their policy was that it would protect the youth of the land from the temptations of drink and of crime.
What sane citizen did not listen attentively to this plea; did not picture for himself a day when the street corner was purged of the ungodly saloon? What father and mother did not envision their own boy as he set forth upon the romance of life freed from the handicap of the saloon’s temptation! No wonder, that a few short years ago the vast majority of us were advocates of any system or policy which would abolish from our cities’ corners the old time drinking houses.
If prohibition had accomplished this, then it were a blessing. But if the reverse is true; if it has demoralized the home, if it has corrupted our youth, and if it has multiplied saloons, then the home, the most sacred institution of civil society, has been attacked.
THE WICKERSHAM COMMISSION
In another of his campaign declarations our prohibition President, Mr. Hoover, defined it as a “Noble Experiment.” In accordance with a campaign pledge, he appointed a Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to inquire into the operations of the prohibition law. On this Commission he appointed a former Attorney General of the United States as chairman; a distinguished Judge of one of the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal; two Federal District Judges; a former distinguished Secretary of War; a one time Judge of the Supreme Court of one of our great States; two eminent deans of law universities; and a noted woman educator. For the use of this Commission, Congress appropriated $500,000 to enable them to make a study of the prohibition question.
A period of eighteen months of study has been completed. A nation wide survey has determined the real facts and has heard the testimony of hundreds of eminent citizens both for and against the law.
OFFICIAL FINDINGS
On pages 32 and 33 of the official reprint of the Report of this Commission to President Hoover, facts are presented which show that home brewing, home wine making and home distilling have become general since the adoption of the National Prohibition Law. It is pointed out in the same official document that the Federal Government itself is making huge loans to the California grape growers to help them manufacture and distribute prepared materials for the home consumption of strong wines on a large scale.
With respect to home distilling the Wickersham Report says: “Home distilling has gone on from the inception of prohibition; and in some localities has at one time or another reached large proportions.
Also the fact that much home production of liquor is carried on everywhere, facilitates the use of what appears to be dwellings as cloaks for illicit manufacture.”
One page twenty-one of that same Report the Commission discussed the prevalence of drinking in homes, in clubs and in hotels. After describing the almost national use of illicit liquor, it adds that people of wealth, business and professional men and their families, are drinking in large numbers in quite frank disregard of the declared policy of the National Prohibition Act.
THE MULTIPLICATION OF SALOONS
Now I pause to ask ourselves what is the effect of this disregard of the law and of the manufacture of liquor in the American home upon the homelife of the people and its most priceless possessions - the children?
The Wickersham Commission announced in official words: “To the serious effects of this attitude of disregard of the declared policy of the National Prohibition Act must be added the bad effects upon children and employee of what they constantly see in the conduct of otherwise law abiding citizens. Such things and the effect upon youth of making liquor in the home . . . are disquieting.”
These quotations and statements are more or less general. But they are in keeping with what one of the leading dry propagandists of the country has openly remarked. I refer to Canon William Sheaf Chase, Superintendent of the National Reform Association, a professional prohibition organization. On pages 121 and 122 of a book entitled “Law Observance” (issued by W. C. Durant), the Canon is quoted as saying: “The only limitation to the home saloon is that liquors are not sold within its walls, in the presence of federal officers, unless they are trespassers or bribed. But that limitation is easily abated by any bootlegger or moonshiner.
“Here we have the compromise that drove the saloon from the public places where children were protected by being barred from their doors, into the private homes where the children must live.
“The children could not go to the saloon but the Volstead Act takes the saloon to the children.
“Here in the home the adult members of the family and the invited guests sit with the children at the family table, sip these unconstitutionally protected liquors, damn the Constitution, curse and vilify the enforcement officers. Children here are led into lives of crime.”
This statement, ladies and gentlemen, comes from the mouth and the heart of one of the most aggressive advocates of the law who appears at every prohibition hearing of Congress to insist that the law which he admits has taken the saloon to the children and is leading them into lives of crime shall and must be retained upon the statute books of the nation.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE GOVERNMENT
Meanwhile, the President has laid the Report of this so-called Wickersham Committee before the Congress of the United States, without one word of comment on the Commission’s findings with respect to the effect of the manufacture of liquor in the home in the presence of little children. Although he said in his campaign speech that the purpose of the Eighteenth Amendment was for the protection of the home, yet with this Commission telling him that it is undermining the home and demoralizing the lives of the children - he prefers to be as silent as a sphinx.
Moreover, the President’s own Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement made bold to call his attention to the fact that: “Prepared materials for the purpose of easy home wine making are now manufactured on a large scale with Federal aid.” This means, ladies and gentlemen, that the Federal Government is furnishing money to make it easy to manufacture wine in the home and indirectly has leagued itself with the bootleggers of the nation.
What department of the Federal Government is lending money to make it easy to manufacture wines and champagne in the home ? How much money has it lent? How much wine is being manufactured in the home? These are questions which may be answered only by quoting from official government documents.
On page 48 of the booklet issued by the Federal Farm Board there appears this statement: “The grape industry is financed by intermediate credit banks and by the Federal Farm Board.”
On page 47 it says: “It is planned that through Fruit Industries Incorporated numerous by-products will be developed so that ultimately the surplus of grapes will be absorbed.”
Now the by-products which have been developed consist chiefly of a grape concentrate from which twelve to twenty per cent wines can be manufactured in the home. As shown by a letter addressed to Congressman John A. Cochran, of Missouri, and which can be read in the Congressional Record of February 6th, 1931, the Federal Government has made loans to the California Grape Industries of $19,187,662.27 of which $2,555,330 went to the Fruit Industries, Ltd. (by the way, this word “limited” smacks very much of English origin), whose principal business is making grape concentrate for easy home manufacture of wines and champagnes, containing from twelve to twenty per cent alcohol. Thousands upon thousands of cars of California grapes are shipped every year, and the Federal Prohibition Bureau admits that most of these go into the home under the patronage and protection of the Federal Government who denounces as a criminal every citizen who even manufactures a home brew containing as much as one-half of one per cent of alcohol.
How much wine is manufactured in the home under the patronage and protection of the Government? This is a fair question. And to answer it, let the record of the Federal Government itself speak.
ADMISSIONS FROM THE OFFICIALS
The Federal Prohibition Director of the United States Department of Justice is a gentleman by the name of Amos W. W. Woodcock, charged with the duty of enforcing the National Prohibition Law. In September, 1930, Mr. Woodcock issued a document, on page 36 of which we read his estimate of wines made in the United States not only in the year 1930, but from the years 1923 to 1930. These estimates are based entirely upon the production and shipment of California grapes which, as I said a moment ago, are partially financed by the Federal Government.
Mr. Woodcock estimated that the wine production of 1930 was 118,320,300 gallons all containing twelve per cent of alcohol. For the five years, 1925 to 1930 inclusive, he found that the probable production of wine from California grapes was 678,320,030 gallons and that this wine contained 71,366,886 gallons of absolute alcohol which, in the equivalent of moonshine whiskey or brandy would be 142,733,272 gallons of one-hundred per cent proof. And all this in a so-called prohibition nation!
For the five years preceding prohibition Mr. Woodcock quotes the official records of the Internal Revenue Bureau which shows that the wine consumption in the United States during those years was 229,293,090 gallons.
Now the fact of the matter is this according to the official figures of our Government: Almost exactly three times as much wine of twelve per cent alcoholic content is being manufactured in the United States under prohibition as before prohibition!
But pause for a moment! Under a peculiar provision of the National Prohibition Act, which you may read in section twenty-nine, this entire production of wine, so far as it is manufactured in the home, is legal, and is so regarded and accepted by the Federal Prohibition Bureau.
The Prohibition Act has made it illegal to operate a saloon on the corner. It has legalized saloons in every household of America.
These are only a few of the facts which it is possible to assemble during the short space of time allotted to me to indicate that the National Prohibition Act as it stands upon our statute books has made possible saloons of every home of America.
THE LEGAL LOOPHOLE
Let me digress for a moment to state that Fruit Industries, Ltd., which is being financed by the Federal Government and is, therefore, in one way or the other under the protection of the Federal Government, has for its legal guardian Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, former Assistant Attorney General of the United States, who had charge of all prosecutions of violation of the prohibition law, and was most active in the last Presidential campaign for the perpetuation of the Prohibition Act. In the literature of this Company issued under her legal advice, the public is informed that it may lawfully buy and use grape concentrate for making full bodied, dark, red Spanish-type port and other types of wines. In the literature which is disseminated under her legal guidance, you are invited to purchase a keg of their concentrate and wait for sixty days when you will be pleasantly surprised.
Under the late Assistant Attorney General’s legal guidance the question is asked of the purchaser: “Is all this legal?” And the answer printed in their pamphlet is this: “Absolutely legal. Section twenty-nine of the Prohibition Act specifically permits you to have Vine-Glo (which is the trade name of the concentrate) in your home provided simply that you do not transport it or sell it.” It does not say, however, that you may not drink it or give it to your children.
Mr. Woodcock, who is in charge of the enforcement of this National Prohibition Act, when asked about the constitutionality of the manufacture of fruit juices or wines or cider in your home; in response to a question pressed upon him by Congressman Tinkham to the effect that it was possible under the National Prohibition Law for every home to become a winery, or a brewery, or a distillery, he answers: “This is the law as Congress has made it.”
Still quoting from the official Government records, this same Mr. Woodcock asserts that practically 70,000,000 gallons of unlawfully distilled liquors are being produced in our prohibition country each year. The few hundred- thousand gallons smuggled from Canada or from England is a mere bagatelle.
GOVERNMENT ACTIVITY
Moreover, we are astounded when we read in the official records of the Prohibition Bureau that during the past ten years, 1,893,396 illicit stills have been confiscated. We are dumbfounded when General Lincoln C. Andrews, who was in charge of all prohibition activities of the Federal Government, testified before the United States Senate that not more than one still in ten has been detected, thus making the total of illicit stills in operation 18,934,960.
Contemplate what this means! Practically so many homes have been turned into wineries, breweries or distilleries and producing besides this immense gallonage of liquor, 672,320,050 gallons of wine and champagne for the past five years and 683,000,000 gallons of beer in the last year.
Who will say that these millions both of licit and illicit wineries, breweries, and distilleries have a salutary influence upon the home life of the people and particularly that of the children? Who will not agree with the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement - the President’s own Wickersham Commission - that it is practically impossible to stop home manufacture? On page 33 of this official report the tragic statement reads as follows: “The difficulties presented by home production differ from those arising in other phases of the general situation . . . Law here bows to the actualities.”
My friends, can it be more emphatically stated that the present National Prohibition Law has driven the manufacture of liquors into the American home where it is impossible for the Federal Government with all its great powers of investigation, with its swarms of spies, with its legalized speak-easies to root out the evil that has sought refuge at the family fireside?
A NOBLE EFFORT
There are some who are liable to criticize the Federal Government for having been lax in its enforcement of this prohibition law. But bear in mind that the Wickersham Commission frankly states that its enforcement cannot be accomplished without the aid of the State Government. On page 82 of the official report an open confession admits the tragic lack of co- operation between State and Federal authorities and concludes that there are no signs that co-operation from the States will ever be extended.
Do not rush to conclusions by condemning the Federal Government for laxity in enforcement. On page 79 of this official document which I am still quoting we are informed that there has been more sustained pressure to enforce this law of prohibition than there has been of any other Federal statute. More than a thousand victims of the prohibition law are sent to jail and penitentiaries by the Federal Government every week in the year, to say nothing of the additional thousands being jailed by the State Governments. Approximately $50,000,000 a year is expended on maintaining this arm of the Federal prosecution. Moreover, a revenue loss of $483,040,854.47 is courageously accepted. The jurors selected for the trial of bootlegging cases are questioned as to their religion and to their stand on the prohibition question before being sworn in to hear a case. Hundreds of pulpits have given themselves over to preach this one “I believe in God” as if it constituted the Ten Commandments which were written among the thunders of Mt. Sinai. The Federal Government has left nothing undone to enforce the National Prohibition Act.
THE RESULT
And with what result? Statistics from 315 of our chief American cities as officially compiled by the police departments prove that there were twice as many arrests for drunkenness in 1929 as in 1919. Washington, our National Capital which President Hoover hoped to make the model city of the Union, lamented the fact that for the six years preceding prohibition, 51,321 arrests for drunkenness on the public streets were made; but in the six years of 1925 to 1930, this total leaped to 79,000 arrests.
In 1928, the City of Philadelphia, with less than 3,000,000 population, registered 60,395 arrests for public drunkenness, as compared with 55,642 convictions for drunkenness in England and Wales combined, with a total population of 40,000,000.
We were told that prohibition would empty our jails and prisons. But the prison records as compiled by the official Census Bureau show that there were 68,735 prisoners in the State and Federal prisons and reformatories in 1910. But in the prohibition year of 1927 these same prisons housed 96,126 inmates.
In England and Wales combined there were 9,508 prisoners in 1926, which is the last year of which I possess the statistics.
But, while the United States under prohibition is crowding its jails and penitentiaries to the door with prisoners, England, without prohibition, has been able to sell 27 jails during the last few years. The State of Illinois has practically as many prisoners in its penitentiaries as has the entirety of England.
These figures are more appalling when we stop to realize that by far the greater number of our prisoners are between the ages of sixteen and twenty- five years.
Ladies and gentlemen, to express the chief argument of those who uphold the present prohibition law as it stands upon our statute books, they maintain that its prime function is to protect the youth of the country. Need I remind you that venereal diseases oftentimes are diseases of youth? Must I inform you quoting from official public health service statistics 1,250,000 persons place themselves under treatment every day of the year for these social scourges which wreck the lives and happiness of millions of people? Need I unfold to you the sordid story that last year 16,000 persons died from this plague that is worse than leprosy? Must I blush when I inform you that since the advent of prohibition, this disease of the youth of our nation has increased incredibly? And do not venereal diseases sound the lowest depths of immorality in the ears of those who would keep upon our statute books a hypocritical law which is supposed to guarantee the safety of the youth of America - youths who when they marry will make martyrs of their wives and imbeciles of their offspring?
Do not these indications point to the inescapable conclusion that something has transpired during the prohibition era of almost universal disrespect for law to involve our nation in a wave of criminality unequal to any other period in its history?
And its greatest victims are the youth of the land!
MORE BY-PRODUCTS
And then there is the sordid history of graft. Time permits me but to mention the fact passingly that Colonel Isham Randolph, the President of the Chicago Association of Commerce and the spokesman for the Chicago Business Men’s Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Crime, informs us that the profits of the Al Capone beer racketeering, which alone operates 20,000 blind pigs in that city, are so enormous that $2,000,000 a week are available for the bribery of police and other public officials.
Do not be alarmed at this huge slush fund for bribery. When you consider that a 10,000 gallon tank car of legitimate industrial alcohol is worth only $3,000; when you consider that in 10,000 gallons of alcohol there are 80,000 quarts of one-hundred per cent proof gin or moonshine whiskey which retails for $5.00 a quart, what is the answer? In money, it is $400,000! $3,000 becomes $400,000 from one tank car of alcohol. And the bootlegger becomes a capitalist through his illicit activities because he openly preaches that if the Federal Government can loan money to the Vine-Glo Corporation of California for the indirect manufacture of twelve per cent proof wine, he will not surrender his bootlegging until the Federal Government gets out of the racket.
THE CONCLUSION
In this discussion, ladies and gentlemen, I have presented no opinions of my own. I have merely given you the picture of prohibition in its relation to its effects on the family life of our nation as compiled from official, federal, uncontrovertible documents.
During the ten years of this “Noble Experiment” we have had Presidents, Congressmen and Senators whose elections in no mean degree were attributed to those who advocated the present prohibition system. During the major portion of this time the enactment of the National Prohibition Act was in the hands of the Secretary of the Treasury whose prohibitionist admirers have termed him to be the greatest since the days of Alexander Hamilton.
Still withal, this Frankenstein of prohibition as it stands upon our statute books has been too gigantic a problem for our prohibition Presidents and for the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since the days of Alexander Hamilton. If these gentlemen cannot control the law, what genius of Americanism can be expected to arise from the ranks of a demoralized country to prevent the National Prohibition Act from completing the destruction of our youth?
I repeat I am neither for nor against prohibition. But I am absolutely opposed to the method in which is being enacted a law that is making hypocrites of Americans, criminals of citizens, and potential bandits of the youth of our country. As it stands today upon our statute books, it has been the most diabolical influence outside the actual negation of religion that is destroying the youth of America and the hope of our future.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are confronted today with the recurrence of the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” Under the guise of friendship, the present Prohibition Act has unsheathed a sword which is reeking with the blood of the youth of our land, as Herod-like it spoke honeyed words of kindness, and held out a hand filled with Greek gifts of happiness. As of old the infamous Herod mouthed his hypocrisy and manifested his anxiety of going over to Bethlehem to worship the Infant in the manger, so we of today who are satisfied with the National Prohibition Act as it stands upon our statute books are but following his example in devising the destruction of the youth of our nation, the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.
Either obtain the co-operation of the States in its enforcement or repeal it. Either correct it or destroy it. Either rewrite it or eliminate it. For as it stands today, it forebodes no good.
I remember having read the funeral oration of John Barleycorn preached by a nationally known evangelist. I recollect that he concluded his discourse with the following words: “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory: We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into store houses and corn cribs. Men will walk upright now; women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” In the face of the official facts which I have made known this evening - facts which, perchance, many of you do not like to hear but which, nevertheless, do not alter their truthfulness - this prophecy of the Reverend William Sunday has gone wrong. After ten years of the “Noble Experiment” that was intended for the protection of the American home, it will be necessary for some dark angel to substitute “Standing Room Only” over the gates of hell instead of Billy Sunday’s sign “For Rent.”