The Eighteenth Amendment

by William H. Benson

January 16, 2014

     On January 16, 1919, Nebraska’s legislature voted to ratify the eighteenth amendment that prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Because Nebraska was the 36^th state to ratify the amendment, the temperance movement had the necessary two-thirds of the state legislatures’ approval. A year later, at midnight on January 17, 1920, the amendment, and the Volstead Act to enforce it, turned the United States dry.

     Temperance officials believed that a Federal law was the best solution to the liquor problem, and so they had pushed this amendment through the state legislatures. “Prohibition represented a genuine attempt to better the lives of people,” but instead, it did them “untold harm.”

     In the nineteenth century in America, people recognized the damage that resulted from excess alcohol consumption, and so they had formed leagues and clubs, such as Boston’s American Temperance Society. Members signed pledge cards that they would cease all consumption.

     Cary Nation did far more. After she buried her alcoholic husband, she carried a hatchet into a string of saloons, and there she axed the bars and the bottles. This one-woman army commanded attention.

     Now, with an amendment tacked onto the Constitution, people thought the problem solved.

     “No prophet arose to foretell the awful things that were coming: the rum ships prowling off the coasts, the illicit breweries and distilleries, the bootleggers, the speakeasies, the corruption of police and judiciary, the hijackers and their machine guns, the gang wars, the murders and assassinations, the national breakdown of morals and manners, and all the rest of the long train of evils that sprang from the Eighteenth Amendment,” wrote Herbert Asbury in his book Great Illusion.  

     Because the law prohibited the manufacture, distribution, and sale of liquor, legitimate companies were driven out of those businesses, and so the criminals rushed in to assume their duties.      

     Those who wanted to drink did so. H. L. Mencken, columnist at the Baltimore Sun, stockpiled dozens of bottles in his basement prior to the amendment. Drinkers found plenty of people willing to ignore the federal law and sell them liquor, and so evasion was the rule. Federal authorities might arrest a violator, but juries failed to convict him because the gangsters would threaten and bully the jurors.

     The most notorious gangster was Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, who controlled liquor distribution across Chicago. Born January 17, 1899, he turned twenty-one the day that Prohibition became the law. Gang warfare broke out between Capone’s South side Italians and the North side Irish, and so on Valentine’s Day 1929, Capone’s gang machine-gunned seven of Bugs Moran’s Irish gang.

     Once Elliot Ness and his fellow revenue agents, the so-called Untouchables, understood that they could not convict Capone of alcohol distribution, nor for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, they prosecuted him for failure to pay income tax on his illegal profits. The jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to eleven years in prison. He served eight, including a stint at Alcatraz.

     By 1933, after thirteen years, the nation’s citizens and its law enforcement agents had had enough. They recognized that the amendment had failed and that they preferred regulation to prohibition. On December 5, 1933, Utah’s legislature voted to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment that repealed the Eighteenth and rendered the Volstead Act unconstitutional, the 36^th state legislature to do so. The “noble experiment” ended, and once again, the nation was wet.

     Public health officials tried a different tactic when they recognized that cigarette smoking resulted in lung cancer and emphysema. Instead of passing a law that made tobacco production and distribution illegal, they educated the public. Fifty years ago, on Saturday, January 11, 1964, Luther Terry, the Surgeon General, issued his 377-page “Report on Smoking and Health.” The result: smoking has subsided from 50% of men in 1964 to just 19% today, and from 33% of women to less than 17% today. Millions of people have lived longer because of that report’s dissemination and influence.

     Government officials tried prohibition when they declared a war on drugs decades ago, but they did so without a Constitutional amendment. Yet, this prohibition has delivered the same: organized crime, gangs, gang warfare, massive numbers incarcerated, murders. This time though possession is illegal.

     Now that Colorado and Washington are edging towards regulation, rather than outright prohibition, we are unsure whether that is good or bad for our citizens. A writer in The Week said, “Legalization may prove to be a mistake—or it may not. Either way, ‘it’s an experiment worth conducting.’”

     I am not convinced that is true. When governments impose laws and experiment with people’s lives, we have seen that the side effects can result in a social disaster. The nation has tried prohibition, and now Colorado and Washington will try regulation.

Work and the Rorschach Test

by William H. Benson

January 2, 2014

     In a scene from “The Andy Griffith Show,” Deputy Barney Fife showed an inkblot to Otis Campbell, Mayberry’s town drunk, and asked him what he saw. Otis said he saw a bat, but Barney objected and said that the inkblot represented a butterfly. Next, Barney showed Sheriff Andy Taylor the same inkblot, and he too said it was a bat. Barney rolled his eyes and refused to accept that answer.

     You see a bat, but I see a butterfly. I see a butterfly, but you see a bat. Perspective is everything.

     Early in the twentieth century, the psychologist Hermann Rorschach developed ten symmetrical inkblots that he would show to patients and then ask for their responses. From them, he would determine a person’s personality traits, although critics dismiss the test and call it pseudoscience.

     Two weeks ago in The York Times there appeared an opinion column “A Formula for Happiness,” written by Arthur C. Brooks, president of a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Brooks’s formula for happiness is, in a single word, “work,” and he makes a persuasive case that “work is uniquely relevant to our happiness.”

     He based his formula upon the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey that found that 80% of Americans are either “fairly satisfied,” “very satisfied,” or “completely satisfied” with their jobs, and, Brooks writes, “This finding generally holds across income and education levels.” This opposes the idea that Americans consider their work as unwelcome but necessary drudgery. Through work we create value and meaning in our lives and in the lives of others.

     The Declaration of Independence opens with the words: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and Americans know that they possess those rights. If we dislike our jobs, if the boss mistreats us, or if we are poorly paid, or if we see little opportunity in the job we now hold, we can quit and pursue different employment, one that will deliver life and liberty and happiness.

     The former slave Frederick Douglass said that we all need “patient, enduring honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put.” Arthur C. Brooks commented that Douglass’s words “struck the bedrock of our culture and character.” Joblessness, Brooks writes, “is catastrophic for happiness.” Alcohol and drug abuse, depression, and family disharmony converge like wolves on the home that lacks a job.

     Time‘s Person of the Year, Pope Francis, echoed the same thought last October when he was asked what is the most serious evil facing the world today. He answered, “youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old,” two segments of the population who find it difficult to locate work. In some parts of the United States, youth unemployment stands at 25%, an unacceptable number.

     On Tuesday, November 26, Pope Francis issued his Evangelii Gaudium, or The Joy of the Gospel, and in it he criticized the “new tyranny” of “unfettered capitalism” and denounced trickle-down economics “which assume that economic growth . . . will succeed in bringing about greater justice. . . . Meanwhile the excluded are still waiting.” Francis pointed to the gap that distances rich from poor.

     Yes, capitalism has its critics: from the Church, from the Left, from the disenfranchised, and from the poor, but others see it different. Andrew Napolitano of the Washington Post, responded to the Pope’s comments and said “No economic system in history has alleviated more poverty, generated more opportunity, and helped more formerly poor people.” Brooks argued that, “Free enterprise gives the most people the best shot at earning their success and finding enduring happiness in their work.”

     But it requires immense effort and work.

     Three weeks ago I went to the movie “Twelve Years a Slave,” a brutal and savage reenactment of the South’s plantation system prior to the Civil War, raw capitalism at its ugliest. Management badly mistreated their labor source, the men and women and children who worked their fields.

     Yes, there was zero unemployment, but what trickled down to Solomon Northup and his fellow slaves was chains, beatings, a whip, the whipping post, a flayed back, the buying and selling of naked men and women, name-calling, intimidation, humiliation, and abject terror. In a word, hopelessness.

From their perspective life was a relentless and cruel existence.     

     You see a bat, but I see a butterfly. No. I see the bat, but you see the butterfly. Perspective is everything, and our perspective for our job is determined by how the supervisor treats the employees.

     Managers have learned that if they wants laborers and employees to show up and work hard for the minimum eight hours, they must treat them with dignity and respect, and not resort to physical abuse, but if they whip their employees, their laborers will leave and find other jobs. They will pursue happiness elsewhere.

     Have a blessed and happy New Year in 2014.

Prince Harry and IceCube

by William H. Benson

December 19, 2013

     On Friday the thirteenth Prince Harry arrived at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The twenty-nine-year old British army helicopter pilot joined his six UK teammates as they gathered around the mirror-like chrome sphere set atop the red and white striped pole. “It will just prove to everybody,” Harry said, “that there’s so much that can be made possible when you think that nothing else is left.”

     His team wore red parkas and was one of three teams that raised funds for Walking with the Wounded, a charity that supports wounded servicemen and women. The United States team wore blue, and the Australian and Canadian team wore yellow. At first, the three teams raced, but then part-way through they gave up the competition and decided to cooperate and enjoy the 208 mile course.

     For over a week the three teams’ members walked across Antarctica’s ice on skis, while holding a pole in each hand and pulling a sled that contained food, supplies, and tent. Because the elevation at the South Pole is at 9301feet high, the air is thin, the average daily high temperature this month is -15.7 °F, and the wind blows strong every day. Most of that elevation, nearly two miles thick, is compressed ice.

     What did Prince Harry see once he arrived at the South Pole? First, he saw a settlement of no more than 200 people, mainly scientists: glaciologists, astrophysicists, and climatologists. He saw the unheated 164 foot wide geodesic dome, built in 1975, that holds the town’s supplies and fuel, and he saw the modern rectangular box-like building that stands on stilts above the icepack, and where the men and women live and work and relax.

     He saw the South Pole Telescope, first directed at the stars in 2007, and also he saw the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the South Pole’s most amazing attraction. The Observatory is a three-year-old telescope that is aimed not at the stars above, but at the ice underneath.

     Scientists drilled eighty-six holes deep into that ice, almost to bedrock. They then dropped a string of sixty Digital Optical Modules, each the size of a basketball, down each hole to depths of between 4750 to 8000 feet. The 5160 DOM’s detect the faint blue light that is emitted whenever a neutrino from outer space strikes an oxygen atom, part of the water molecule. The ghost-like neutrino is without electrical charge and mass, and passes through everything it touches, including planet Earth.

     For months, the astrophysicists watched but failed to find any neutrinos, and so they looked at the data again. On November 26, 2013, Professor Lutz Kopke announced that “we have found neutrinos that were very probably generated in the vast expanses of outer space.” He and his fellow scientists  discovered twenty-eight high-energy neutrinos that passed through IceCube between 2010 and 2012.

     The scientists believe that the neutrinos were created “in the proximity of supernovas, black holes, pulsars, active galaxies, or other extra galactic phenomena.” These cosmic accelerators drove the neutrinos outward in all directions. A reporter explained that IceCube is like a camera that develops “a long-exposure photograph” of what once occurred in deep space. Rather than seeing photons of light, it detects the neutrinos, the negative image of that light.

     Astrophysics is a science that promises future revelations, as well as exciting and intriguing glimpses into other galaxies, and into other worlds within our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers continue to discover other planets that revolve around their own sun, and their goal is to find a planet situated at that ideal distance from its sun, like Earth, neither too hot nor too cold, a place where plant and animal life could evolve.

     So back from the Afghanistan war are Prince Harry, a member of Britain’s royal, and his fellow warriors, some who walked on Antarctica’s ice with a prosthesis, or who saw none of it because they were blinded by a bomb. Harry was truly walking with the wounded. They met the scientists at the frozen South Pole, a place where neither native plant or animal lives, on a continent that receives so little precipitation that geographers label it a desert.

     Warriors and scientists have little to say to each other because they each hold different mindsets, distinct and divergent points of view of how to see and relate to the world. A ruler would not send his scientists to the battlefield, and he would not ask his warriors to conduct scientific experiments. But for a few hours last weekend, they met and talked about deep space, neutrinos, and a space observatory located in a dense block of ice a mile or two below their feet.

     Perhaps Harry and his team will stay long enough to celebrate the South Pole’s summer solstice on December 21, the day when summer begins, when the shadows are the shortest. 

Human Migration

by William H. Benson

December 5, 2013

     Sixty thousand years ago perhaps as few as “a couple of hundred people,” members of the species Homo Sapiens, departed “humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa,” and ventured out of Africa and crossed into Arabia. Some of their progeny walked north into Europe, but others headed east into Asia and down to Australia, or crossed the Bering Sea and walked south into North and South America. Now, after 2,500 generations, human beings claim the Earth.

     The National Geographic writer Paul Salopek calls this epic journey “by far our greatest voyage.” He writes that those first African nomads took with them: “complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, and a genius for technological innovation.” They thrived everywhere.

     On occasion they met up with other species of hominins, such as the “Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, and the Denisovans, who weren’t quite like us.” They may have killed off or may have swallowed whole those other species into their own population. Salopek writes that “Outside Africa, modern human populations seem to contain as much as 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA.”

     This year Salopek began a 21,000 mile walk that will retrace man’s first migration. From Africa he will walk north to Turkey, east to Tajikistan, south into India, then north through China, and thereafter  he will ferry across the Bering Sea, walk the full length of the west coasts of North and South America, and finish at Tierra del Fuego, Chile’s southern point. He claims he will walk for the next 7 years, along with two camels, and you can read of his venture in National Geographic‘s December 2013 edition.

     Human beings migrate. They move. They do so for reasons: wanderlust, the need to see and experience other lands, or because they are driven out of their home, or they see opportunity elsewhere.

     The Pilgrims and the Puritans fled England because of Archbishop Laud’s persecution of those outside of the Church of England’s good graces, and once settled in New England on the coast of North America, they constructed a new Plymouth and a new Boston.

     So ubiquitous are human beings across planet Earth though that when those English people arrived, there were people already here, the First Peoples or the Native Americans or the Indians, and they resented the Englishmen’s claim upon land that they, these natives, had lived upon for generations.

     In 1672, an Indian chief named King Philip attacked, terrorized, and burned down hundreds of New England towns in order to pry the English from their land. They killed some 10 percent of the English population in New England that year, but through sheer force of will, the English prevailed. It is a fact of human history that displaced peoples feel resentment when driven from their native lands.

     Once the Europeans arrived on North America’s coast, they bumped into the tribes living there, and once those tribes moved west, they in turn bumped into other tribes. One writer explained that the migration process resembled an opening shot in a game of pool. The cue ball hits the point ball, and all the other balls scatter. The Cheyenne Indians’ ancient home was in the forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota, but tribes from the east pushed them onto the Great Plains where they adapted and thrived.

     In North America, in the twentieth century, two groups of people moved from the south to the north. First, numerous families of African-Americans left the fields in the segregated southern states to find work and jobs in the factories in the northern cities, such as in Chicago and Detroit. Then, the citizens of the United States of Mexico crossed the border, and here in the United States of America they found work and homes and opportunities that did not appear in Mexico.

     Displaced peoples do not take back their ancient homelands, but the one exception is Israel. Zionism succeeded in its goal to restore David and Solomon’s kingdom of ancient Israel in Palestine for the Jewish people. Israel is a miracle, but its dark side is how the Israelis mistreated the Palestinians. Once Israel declared its independence in May 1948, Lydda’s Palestinian citizens fled and settled in Jordan where they exist in miserable settlements, as a people without land and homes.

     In Palestine or what became Israel, one witnesses the seesaw of human migration.

     In Syria, the war has precipitated a massive migration into Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. According to the United Nations, “Syrian refugees now total more than 2.1 million, just 300,000 one year ago.” The New York Times reported last week that “government and organizations are quietly preparing for the refugee crisis to last years.” The refugee is the most destitute of all migrants because they migrate not by choice but by necessity.

     After 60,000 years and 2,500 generations, Homo Sapiens have conquered Earth and adapted to its heat and cold, to its blizzards and tornados, and wherever they settle they fight and struggle to maintain ownership of their land.

Rex and Rose Mary Walls

by William H. Benson

November 21, 2013

     Rex Walls was a character. Brash, loud, full of opinions, and convinced that he knew all that needed knowing, he stormed his way through life. When his daughter, Jeannette, then only four, burned her stomach when cooking some hotdogs, Rex got into a shouting match with the doctor, and then took her home. When attending mass, Rex would shout blasphemous words at the priest, embarrassing his wife and four kids. He was able to talk himself into a job as an electrician anytime and anywhere, but he could never keep the job once the supervisor gave him instructions.

     On the plus side, he was intelligent, a great reader, accomplished in math and science and technology, but on the negative side, he was an alcoholic, a womanizer, and was paranoid, convinced that the FBI was after him. He never paid his bills. When the landlord wanted the rent money, Rex would “skedaddle,” and move on. The family “had 27 addresses in five years.”

     Rose Mary Walls was patient, calm, and nonchalant, despite her husband’s chaotic temperament. She treated her kids kindly; there were no rules and no punishments. On the negative side, she was a dreamer, who believed herself a great artist and novelist, but she was so oblivious to her kids’ needs that she refused to prepare meals. Her attitude was, “why prepare a meal when its gone in thirty minutes, when a work of art will last forever?” So she painted all day and hoarded piles of junk.

     One day Jeannette, then in elementary school, ate a stick of margarine, the only thing in the refrigerator. When Rose Mary asked her why, Jeanette explained, “because I was hungry, mom.”

     The family finally settled into a shack at 93 Little Hobart Street in Welch, West Virginia, Rex’s hometown. There was no plumbing, other than a yellow bucket, and very little coal for the furnace, but there was an abundance of snakes, rats, cats, dogs, and Rosemary’s junk that piled up everywhere. Rex drank all the time, and would disappear for days at a time. As the house deteriorated, so did the family.

     At school, Jeannette was so hungry that she rooted in the garbage, eating what the other students had thrown away: a half-eaten apple, part of a sandwich, or a pickle. She and her two sisters, Lori and Maureen, and her brother, Brian, were starving skinny urchins, but Rose Mary gained weight. One day they discovered why; they caught her eating a chocolate bar.

     Once Lori graduated from high school, she bought a one-way ticket to New York City and escaped the family’s chaos, and Jeannette followed a year later. Once there, Jeannette found work and a room to rent, finished high school, and graduated from Barnard College. She took a job as a column writer, and encouraged Brian and Maureen to also come to New York City.

     Dad and mom followed. The four kids tried to help their parents, but it was hopeless. Eventually, Rex and Rose Mary were homeless, squatters who lived in an abandoned building. One evening, Jeannette was driving to a party and saw her mom pulling food and junk out of a dumpster. Rex died at fifty-nine, after consuming “four packs of cigarettes and two quarts of booze since he was thirteen.”

     In 2005, Jeanette published her book, The Glass Castle, a memoir of her life with Rex and Rose Mary, and today Jeanette and her husband live on an acreage in Virginia. For Rose Mary, Jeanette built a cottage on her property, and there her mother lives with her dogs and cats. A reporter from the New York Times went to interview Rose Mary last spring, and came away appalled.

     “The stench of cat urine was an almost-physical entity, pushing against the piles of garbage and crusted-over cat food in myriad dishes. One room was so filled with junk that it was impossible to enter. Rose Mary’s light blue T-shirt was heavily stained, as were her bluejeans. The filth, the stink, the boxes, and the piles were like a force field separating her from the world.”

     Jeannette commented, “That was nothing to the smell I grew up with.”

     Hollywood wants to convert The Glass Castle into a movie, and “Jennifer Lawrence was recently announced to play Jeannette Walls.”  

     Several years ago, Jeannette invited her mom and siblings to celebrate Thanksgiving with her and her husband. When they were ready to gather at the table and eat, Brian looked at the dishes and said, “You know, it’s really not that hard to put food on the table if that’s what you decide to do.”

     In America that is so evident. Supermarkets are everywhere, and jobs are plentiful, despite the economists’ grim announcements. Because we live in America, we have much to be thankful for.

     Rex Walls was lost to alcohol and dissipation, and Rose Mary was lost to her unfulfilled dreams of artistic greatness and her hordes of junk, and so their kids were caught in their parent’s crossfire and forced to eat margarine and root around in a garbage pail.

     Next Thursday, we will buy groceries, prepare a turkey, and celebrate Thanksgiving, but only if that it what we decide to do so.