Liberty Booze

If you want to brush up on the basics of the American Constitution, you could do worse than making yourself a drink (or nursing a hangover, in my case) and curling up with What Prohibition Has Done to America by Fabian Franklin.

Fabian was a civil engineer and mathematician who went on to become editor of the Baltimore News and later associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

He worked himself into a conservative fury over Prohibition in 1922, accusing supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment of perverting the Constitution, undermining America's respect for the law, destroying our federal system and weakening our sense of individual liberty.

The Founding Fathers, he declared, "did not for a moment entertain the idea of imposing upon future generations, through the extraordinary sanctions of the Constitution, their views upon any special subject of ordinary legislation. Such a proceeding would have seemed to them far more monstrous, and far less excusable, than that tyranny of George III and his Parliament which had given rise to the American Revolution."

It's fun to see such passion and eloquence in defence of drinking booze, and in the meantime you also get a useful primer on what the Constitution was designed to do, and how federal law, state law and individual freedom interact. It reminded me of the marriage equality debate in a lot of ways, though I'm guessing the parallels are more complicated than they look.

It was also entertaining to read Fabian's argument that Prohibition "will have an immeasurable effect in impairing that instinct of liberty which has been the very heart of the American spirit ... the one great and enduring defense against Socialism," and then imagine using that argument on a modern-day Republican in regards to legalising marijuana.

It can be so refreshing to read political essays from past eras - back when politics seemed less trivial, when people talked about liberty and constitutional rights without sounding like buffoons and even acknowledged their opponents could be intelligent and kind.

And then I run across a line like this:

"It would not be going far beyond the truth to say that the people of New York are being deprived of their right to the harmless enjoyment of wine and beer in order that the negroes of Alabama and Texas may not get beastly drunk on rotgut whiskey."

Oh right.