PROHIBITION: Next: Control

From Dec. 5, when a ratifying convention in the thirty-sixth State (Pennsylvania, Ohio or Utah) puts its formal seal on the 21st Amendment and Prohibition is finally, actually repealed, until after Jan. 3, when Congress meets, the sale of alcoholics in the U. S. will be conducted under State laws which in many cases have not been changed since 1919. Under the Federal code of that date the only U. S. laws touching liquor are those levying import duties and internal revenue taxes. Only authority added by the 21st Amendment is extension of the Federal power to protect Dry States against the interstate shipment of liquor. A committee of Federal officials headed by Undersecretary of the Treasury Dean Acheson has been studying national liquor control with a view to formulating an Administration program. Meantime interested citizens, more Wets than Drys, have been making suggestions. The Beverage Dealers’ Association, which met in Washington last month, thinks that liquor taxes should be low that no sale of liquor to minors or intoxicated persons should be permitted, that brewers and distillers should not be allowed to operate retail outlets, that the sale of liquor in drug stores should be permitted. The Crusaders have endorsed no specific plan for liquor control, are working for appropriate liquor laws in each State. But they strongly advocate temperance (“There is a Dry side and a Wet side and a Right side”) and through the Junior Crusaders are trying to promote temperance in the coming generation. Also in favor of temperance and of State option on liquor control is the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform. The John D. Rockefellers, father & son, used to donate large sums of money to Prohibition. Upon his conversion to the Wet cause a year ago, which made front-page news. Son Rockefeller conceived it to be his social duty to devise a plan for handling the return of that which he had fought for years. So he asked Lawyer Raymond Blaine Fosdick, brother of Rockefeller-endowed Preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Albert Lyon Scott, president of Lockwood Greene Engineers, Inc. (industrial specialists) to make a study. Their report, which Mr. Rockefeller fully endorses, was released to the Press chapter by chapter over the past fortnight by the Rockefellers’ publicist. Ivy Lee. Through last week the Rockefeller Plan shaped up as follows: 1) Complete elimination of private profit—”the core of the problem”—by the establishment of an Alcohol Control Authority in each State, to sell all hard liquor through its own retail outlets at its own fixed price and to regulate the sale of beer and wines in hotels, restaurants, clubs, groceries. The State Authority would have the power to establish dry zones at the request of particular communities. The Authority would consist of three members and a managing director appointed by the governor for nine years at salaries which would insure the services of ablest citizens. Profits from liquor sales would accrue to the State. 2) Liquor taxes should be levied not with the idea of filling the public treasury but as a method of reducing consumption of alcohol. Tax rates should vary with the alcoholic content of the beverage, the price, the luxury, the social value. Thus, the tax on beer should not be more than 10¢ per gallon, on sparkling wines (luxuries) $3 per gallon, on whiskey (antisocial) $3 a gallon. Under this plan $700,000,000in revenue would be collected annually—96% more than the total Federal individual income tax for 1933. 3) Strict avoidance of the licensing system because a) it does not eliminate the profit motive; b) such systems invariably get mixed up with politics; c) licensed traders are not interested in curbing overindulgence and drunkenness; d) once the system is in force and capital is invested in licensed property there is no retreat. When the W. C. T. U. read the Rockefeller plan, it snorted. In a sarcastic bulletin from Evanston headquarters it recalled that taking the profit out of liquor had been advocated 40 years ago by the trustbusting, anticapitalistic Populist Party. Said the W. C. T. U.: “The Populists were looked upon by the Rockefeller family as insane in 1893. And yet the younger Rockefeller presents this Populist idea as a solution to the liquor problem in 1933.”