Volstead And Conversation

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Title:     Volstead And Conversation
Author: Heywood Broun [More Titles by Broun]

There is one argument in favor of Prohibition. It certainly helps to make conversation on a railroad train. In the years before Volstead we had ridden thousands of miles silently peering at the two strangers across the smoking compartment and wondering how to get them talking. The weather is overrated as a common starting point. It dies after a sentence.

Now we have a sure method. Begin with, "Well, this is certainly just the day for a little shot of something," and you will find enough conversation on hand to carry you across the continent. Indeed, nothing but an ocean can stop it.

Some day, of course, we are going to run into a stranger who will reply, "Prohibition is now the national law of our land and I want you to know, sir, that I intend to respect it."

This has never happened yet. It makes us wonder how the drys get from point to point. Either they stay at home, abstain from smoking or betray their cause for the sake of friendliness. During two years of frequent travel we have never yet met an advocate of Prohibition in a smoking compartment.

There was nothing but the most fiery opposition on the part of the man who was going to Rochester.

"It's making criminals out of us," he declared severely but with an ill concealed joy at the thought of being at last, in ripe middle age, a law-breaker. He carried us into Albany with tales of men who "never touched a drop until they went and passed that there law." All these belated roisterers he pictured as reeling in and out of his office under the visible effects of illegal stimulation. He sought to create the impression that he thought the condition terrible, but evidently it had contributed a new and exciting factor to the wholesale fruit business. Even the pre-Volstead drinkers he seemed to find not unworthy of his concern. All of them used to take just one and stop. Now his life was beset with roaring graybeards.

Leaving Albany, the young man in the check suit took up the talk and began a vivid account of recent experiences in Malone, N. Y., which he identified as the strategic point in bootlegging activities. Opening on a note of pathos, in which he wrung the hearts of his hearers by recounting the amazingly low price of Scotch near the border, he introduced a merrier mood by relating a conversation between two farmers of the section which he had overheard.

"What style of car have you got?" asked one of the men in the allegedly veracious anecdote.

"Twenty cases," replied the other laconically.

According to the estimate of the narrator, a bootlegger passes through Malone every eight minutes. He saw one take a turn into Main Street careening along at fifty miles an hour and skid so dangerously that the auto tipped, throwing a case of whiskey clear across the road. "He went out of town making seventy," added the story teller.

Invariably the bootlegger was the hero of his tales. These modern Robin Hoods he pictured as little brothers to all the world except the revenue officers. Once two revenooers caught one of the gallant company and were about to proceed with him to Syracuse, toting along four telltale barrels of rye. But they had gone only a short distance on their journey when they were overtaken by two men in a motor truck escorting a prisoner, heavily manacled, and ten barrels of whiskey. After a short confab they agreed to relieve the revenuers of their prisoner and deliver both miscreants to the proper authorities in Syracuse. The gullible agents of the law gave up their man.

"And," continued the rum romancer, "they never did show up at Syracuse at all. That second crowd they weren't revenue men at all. They were bootleggers."

Indeed, the young man declared that in Northern New York there is a well organized Bootleggers' Union, which pays all fines out of a common fund. So great was his seeming admiration for the rum runners that we suspected him of being himself a member in good standing, but soon we were moved to identify him as a participant in a trade still more sinister. An acquaintance came past the green curtain and inquired eagerly, "Did you sell her?"

"Twice," said the young man enthusiastically and without regard to our look of horror as we were moved by circumstantial evidence to believe him not only a white slaver but a dishonest one.

"Yes," he continued. "I had my work cut out. You see he doesn't like Nazimova."

We were a little sorry to find that the young man was a motion picture salesman. It made us fear that perhaps some of his bootlegging yarns had been colored with the ready fiction of his business. Still it was interesting to sit and learn that Niagara Falls got "Camille" for only $300.

The middle-aged man, the one with the large acquaintance among belated drunkards, seemingly had little interest when the conversation turned from bootlegging to the silver screen. We never did hear what business "The Sheik" did in Albany because he was roaring at a skeptic about cabbage.

"I tell you," he shouted, "they got 110 tons off of every acre."

Now we yield to no man in love of cabbage, but we should not find such quantities appealing. It would compel corn beef commitments beyond the point of comfort.

The skeptic made some timid observation about onions. We did not catch whether it was for or against.

"Do you know," said the cabbage king, "that 75 per cent. of all the onions in America are eaten by Jews?" He said it with rancor, whether racial or vegetable we could not determine. To us it seemed an unusual tribute to an ancient people. No other story of their executive capacity had ever seemed to us quite so convincing. We marveled at the extraordinary coöperation which could hold a habit so precisely to an average easy to compute and remember.

We were also moved to admiration for the census takers. Statistics seem to us man's supreme triumph in solving the mysteries of a chaotic world. Creation, of course, was divine, but even that did not involve bookkeeping.

For a time we considered abandoning our project to write a novel about a newspaper man and his son and make it, instead, a pastoral about a hero simple and sincere whose life was dedicated to the task of determining the ultimate destination of every onion raised in America. Then, since art ought to be international, we planned to widen the scope of the tale and include Bermuda. This would enable us to develop a tropical love interest and get a sex appeal into the story. We are not sure that a book would have a wide sale on onions alone.

Of course other vegetables might enter the story. There could be a villain forever tempting the hero to abandon his career and go after parsnips. Titles simply flooded our mind. We thought of "Desperate Steaks," "Out of the Frying Pan" and "A Bed of Onions," although we had a vague impression that W. L. George had done something of this sort in one of his earlier novels. "Breath Control" we dismissed as too frivolous. "Smothered" was too sensational.

Eventually we abandoned the whole project. We feared that we might not be up to the atmosphere of an onion novel.

Still, the advertising might be very effective if the publisher could be induced to bill the book under a great, flaring headline, "The Onion Forever."

But the train of thought was cut short when the demon vegetable statistician got up and said, "If I could have just one wish in the world, I'd choose a fruit farm between here and Lockport." Looking up to see where "here" was, we observed the Rochester station. The trip had seemed but a moment, and all because of Prohibition.

By the way, did you know that 14.72 per cent, of all the potatoes raised in America come from Maine?

[The end]
Heywood Broun's essay: Volstead And Conversation

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