Tag Archives: temperance

Republicans then and now

Pope endorses 24-hour work shifts

Republican exploitation was fun back then. Plant leaves were legal.(link)

I found the above item in the Meriden Daily Republican for Saturday, December 31, 1878. That was the year the Infallible Pope Leo, appreciative fan of Vin Mariani,  issued a papal bull decrying the cults formed by “semi-barbarian men calling themselves socialists, communists or nihilists…” (link) A free-trade agreement was entered into with the Samoan Islands, silver dollars were coined as legal tender and greenbacks were kept in circulation to please the Grangers and to simplify eventual resumption of the gold standard. 

There had been some ruffled feathers over dry fanatic Rutherford Hayes having been declared winner in 1876 with 165 electoral votes to Samuel Tilden’s 184.  The difference required a swap of 20 electoral votes from Southern States for withdrawal of federal troops so that ku-klux “Redeemers” could make damn good and sure Black voters were suppressed, and kept from voting against Democrats.(link) Four years of “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes refusing to serve alcohol at the Executive Mansion were enough.(link) Hayes was succeeded by Arthur Garfield who was quickly shot by a fellow Republican who had not been awarded “his” hoped-for political sinecure.(link) Observe that in 2016, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson got more votes than either of these Reconstruction-era candidates.(link)

Amid the fallout from crony-assassinations and Jim Crow election-stealing, Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected, defeated by another religious prohibiton fanatic, then reelected despite voter suppression on a platform to do away with “sumptuary laws which vex the citizen and interfere with individual liberty.” (link) Oddly enough, the silver glut and monetary crisis so stressed agrarian cheap-money parties as to bring a surge in neo-communist electoral votes. Cleveland’s second term was so awash in post-Republican financial problems and socialist orators that it stood by as Congress approved a Communist Manifesto Income Tax in 1894.(link)

The banking collapse was so widespread that Supreme Court Justices struck down that Income Tax and saved enough banks to cash their own tax-free paychecks. So ended the first Republican war on enjoyable drugs, and the closest thing to a libertarian Administration since the Jefferson and Jackson Administrations. Communist anarchist assassins and meddlesome coercive prohibitionists rapidly proliferated in These States and in the effete mystical mercantilist monarchies of the Old World, and communist income taxes proliferated apace.(link) World War I soon followed.(link) 

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Three dollars on Amazon Kindle

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

Start of the 1929 Crash

The U.S. stock market began following the fall of the German and French stock markets during the first few days of September, 1929. Above is a typical story about a small still–the large, continuous stills producing thousands of gallons a day never made it into the papers. The story (link) hints that the agent on vacation was turning a blind eye to liquor production, and that his officious replacement was cracking down with faith-based determination and lusty asset forfeiture, but that the coast will again be clear next Wednesday.

RAIDERS SEIZE MOONSHINE STILL—Mash and Finished Product Found at Pawtucket. A Pawtucket raid in which federal prohibition agents attached to the Providence office, under direction of Chief Raiding Officer Michael A O’Brien, today seized a 100 gallon moonshine still and large quantities of mash and finished product is the 22nd seizure whih the office has effected since John W Morill, administrator in charge of the office, left on his vacation two weeks ago.
As a result of the raids, a report of which is being tabulated by Carl A Nelson, drug store inspector, acting as administrator in the absence of Mr Morrill, 21 Rhode Island men have been taken into custody and arraigned before United States Commissioners on charges of violating the prohibition act.
The number of stills and beer plants uncovered during the raids had not been tabulated by Mr Nelson to-day, but the acting administrator indicated that they would far exceed the number seized by the local office over a similar period a year ago, when, he said to-day, seizures totalled six.
No defendant was found on the raid conducted today, on a two-story dwelling house at the junction of Yale and Notre Dame avenues, Pawtucket, where the agents claim to have seized 47 barrels of moonshine mash and a large quantity of alleged moonshine whiskey.
Four stills uncovered last night by the agents in cellars of two houses on Division Street, Central Falls, were about the filthiest in the experience of agents attached to the local force, it was indicated to-day, the report stating  that quarters where the stills were uncovered were infested with rats and other vermin.
Mr Morrill, who is spending his vacation with members of his family in Maine, is expected to resume his duties in this city next Tuesday. Mr Nelson will leave on his annual leave of two weeks the following day. (Providence, RI Evening Tribune 31 AUG1929  1)

On the same page (link) is a report on the difficulties experienced in collecting war reparations payments from Germany. After Austria and Germany attacked other narcotics-producing nations in 1914 then lost in 1918, every country invaded was counting on German reparations payments provided under the Treaty of Versailles. With that money they then paid a little toward the loans gotten from Uncle Sam while being throttled by the Accursed Hun. Throttler replaced throttlee in the Versailles treaty, yet Germany, now fanatically inspired by christian National Socialism, spent its drug income on political parades and armaments, while demanding everyone else disarm.

Why not delve into what caused the 1929 Crash? Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 does exactly that, matching economic theory and newspaper accounts against stock market reactions and competing theories. It is live on Amazon Kindle for the price of a pint.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle in 2 languages

My other-language blog is amigra.us