Our Growing Tyranny

A Consideration of the Lamentable Motive Instigating the Latest Crusade by the "Blue-Noses"

CLARENCE DARROW

THE newspapers have just been carrying reports of the activities of "The Lord's Day Alliance". These good people are about to start another campaign for a blue Sunday. The announcement states that they want a large amount of money to close up all places of amusement and profit—except churches—on the first day of the week.

This new campaign is to begin in Washington. It will be directed against moving pictures, baseball, picnics, and if these holy people succeed, automobiles and Sunday newspapers. Why do they pick on Washington? There are larger cities and to all outward appearances wickeder ones. Why not try New York or Chicago or Kansas City or some real place? The answer is obvious. Washington is controlled by Senators and Congressmen, most of them from the South and the long fastnesses of the West. These are Fundamentalists. The constituents of these Senators and Congressmen believe that it is wicked to have a good time on Sunday. Doubtless, some of the Lord's Day Alliance people think that they are enjoying themselves on Sunday by refraining from work or play on this holy day and in the language of the Westminister Catechism, "spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship except so much as is to be taken in the works of humanity and charity." Everyone is willing to let the members of "The Lord's Day Alliance" spend every minute of Sunday as they wish, but why should they be permitted to make laws to compel healthy people to spend Sunday in the same way that their members find so exciting. Of course these people know perfectly well that if others preferred to go to church rather than a ball game a law would not be needed to send them there. The proposed legislation is to compel them to go to church for fear of jail, or lack of anywhere else to go.

If the people of Washington do not resent the activities of these blue noses, it will be because they have forgotten the meaning of "religious freedom". Jefferson and the fathers meant to guarantee religious liberty to all Americans. The Lord's Day Alliance is not interested in Jefferson and the fathers; they go further back. Moses is their prophet and if they can get the cash to carry on the campaign they propose to pass laws to forbid people from enjoying themselves on Sunday so they will go to church.

It takes more than constitutions and statutes to bring tolerance. If the individual is not born with it or does not get it by living, the law has no power to change him. When the Lord's Day Alliance marches on Washington with their solemn visages and their stern determination, it will be in order for the friends of freedom, if freedom still has friends, to meet them in battle array. It is time that beacon lights should once more be kindled on the hills.

IT is strange how the Puritan has always associated sin with pleasure. Through all the ages the conviction that joy is wrong has amounted to an obsession. This belief has been the prime cause of intolerance from the days of witch burning to Volsteadism. America has had her full share of bigots. These have always known the meaning of evil. To them every healthy emotion and desire has been classified as "bad". No other country in the modern world has hated pleasure like the American Puritan unless possibly the Scotch. The Puritan fathers in New England forbade all theatres of whatever kind to do business on any day of the week. Theatres were meant for pleasure and tended to divert the mind of man from holy things. For a long time the residents of Boston were obliged to go to New York City to attend a playhouse. Then, as now, Boston was much more godly and deadly than New York. It was so utterly blue in Cotton Mather's time that the spirit of bigotry and intolerance still persists. The crusade against witchcraft in America never reached far beyond New England. Around Boston the Puritan ruled supreme. Cotton Mather and John Wesley as well as most of the other eminent English and Scotch divines had a profound belief in witchcraft. While the friends of liberty and intelligence were sleeping, laws were passed making witchcraft punishable by death. So a number of old women and some men were hanged in New England for a crime which no one could possibly commit. The last victim of witchcraft was put to death in New England more than two hundred years ago, but the ghosts of the witch hangers still walk the streets.

The cruel and pestiferous bigots are always looking for some new dog to kill. Although theatres are now permitted in every part of America, still the gloom squad is constantly on guard to watch the plays and the pictures. Gladly would they suppress these entirely, but so long as they can not have their way they make it hard to write a real play or develop a picture that is anywhere near true to life. The one thing they will not do is to leave others to run their own affairs. This they can not do because other people's business is their business.

The Puritans have already searched every crack and crevice to discover sin. The smallest action can not pass by unnoticed by this motley crowd. Women especially have been scrutinized by them with a suspicious, if not an evil eye. Temptation, sin and danger must always be looked for where a woman is considered. Women were carefully instructed how they must dress their hair, any other way was obscene and therefore forbidden by law. They were likewise told how they must and must not dress their bodies. Silks and ribbons were forbidden. It would not do to attract the attention of men. The sort of dress and its length and style were strictly decreed. To show the body was indecent and wicked. Even now the good people wage a constant battle for the right to control the style of woman's dress. If these meddlers could have their way, the beauty and attractiveness of women would be legislated from the world. One needs but look at the pictures of early Puritans to know their taste. If this class should be left free to make over the world and its people according to its will, how much beauty and joy would be left to gladden the hearts of men?

IT is not easy to understand why the activities of the Puritan are so tireless. It would seem that if their own way of life was not interfered with, and their own souls were saved, it would not so much matter to them even if the rest were left to go straight to hell. At the most their consciences should be satisfied by cautioning the sinner and showing him the evil in his way of life. But this is not enough. The jail must be called into use, in their crusade against sin. Surely the Puritan would not send men to jail and otherwise plague and torture them unless they found pleasure in their work. The truth seems to be that these meddlers get a fiendish joy in making others suffer. Nothing gives them so much pleasure as the discomfort of their fellow man. In fact and truth they are really sadists. They must get their pleasure by torturing others. Nothing can exceed their glee in bringing some one to book who tried to enjoy himself contrary to the Puritan way of life. All people must involuntarily seek pleasurable emotions and avoid painful ones. The Puritan finds pleasurable emotions when he witnesses the painful emotions of the sinner.

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No other form of sadism has permitted its addicts to reap so rich a harvest as Volsteadism. The steady resistance of the wicked to being told what they may or may not drink has given all sorts of opportunity for sadistic joy. It is nothing to the torture squad to know that as far back as man procured food and drink, he has learned to use alcohol; it is nothing that it has always been present at secular and religious occasions alike; it is nothing that it has been used to assuage grief and pain. No one is moved by the knowledge that America stands practically alone in this fanaticism, or by the fact that our population is made up from all the countries of the world. Plainly, the use of wine brings pleasure and this emotion is sinful. The general protest that each one should have the right to choose for himself what he shall drink, does not even produce a sympathetic emotion. It adds to the zest of the hunt. It makes the life of the sadists much fuller than it would be if the public supinely abandoned its habits.

The fact that the desire to use some form of alcohol leads men to go to great lengths to find it, and that it is so readily made and so easily imported from any part of the world, does not cause the pursuer even to hesitate in his quest. At the best these good people are not more than a mere majority, and still they insist that one-half of the population should be permitted to send the other half to jail. They have the same sureness of their position that has characterized the persecutor from the earliest times. The crusade for prohibition has all the characteristics and feelings of a religious crusade. It is attended by the same zeal and fanaticism. It moves with the same disregard of consequences. It inspires the same hatreds. It demands the same extreme cruelty and manifests the same exultation over the victim. Neither liberty nor property is safe from the crusader. The zealous fanatics have equal joy whether sending some offender to jail or closing buildings and destroying property that has been used for the unholy business of making or selling wine. The people of Kansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Utah and the South have no more need or real excuse for controlling New York in the matter of prohibition than they would have to make war on France or Germany for selling wine or beer.

In the mad pursuit of the wicked who insist on drinking intoxicating liquors, no class of people has been more subservient to the fanatic than the courts. The judges have continually enlarged the scope of the barbarous law. They have consistently decided all doubtful points against freedom. They have unhesitatingly upheld double jeopardy. They have gleefully destroyed business and injured property by padlocking buildings in obedience to all sorts of complaints. They have taken prohibition agents charged with crime from the jurisdiction of State courts and placed them under the protection of the Federal Courts. There could be no reason to take prohibition agents from State Courts except that Federal Judges doubted State Courts where prohibition is involved. They have inflicted the most extreme penalties for violating the Volstead Act, contrary to the usual custom of passing sentence for crime. All this has been done by judges many of whom have been in the habit of drinking, and, it is believed in some cases, judges who continue to drink. Only a few days ago a man was sentenced to a life term in the penitentiary of Michigan for having a pint of gin in his possession. This sentence was given because of the law providing that a fourth felony sentence should carry life imprisonment. No one seems to mind the rising death rate from poisoning liquor supposed to be used for mechanical purposes. It may be cruel to poison rats, but an individual who drinks should die.

America seems to have an epidemic of intolerance. Instead of working out individual problems, our people are seeking to control each other. This infection has grown to be a scourge. Even the intelligent and cultured are its victims. We no longer distinguish between the civil and the criminal code. If it is believed that a certain course of conduct is good for a community we unhesitatingly pass a criminal statute to enforce this conduct. All precedent is thrown to the winds where liquor is involved.

It would seem as if even the moral sadists might take fright over the success of their work They should ask themselves the question, where will this movement end and what sort of beings will be left when the craze has run its course? Thus far only those who smile find themselves in danger of the jail. Still there are other forms of satisfaction and joy. The Puritan is happy in his work of destruction. He is getting joy from the satisfaction of his weird emotions. He has learned to conceal his mirth behind a stern and solemn fact. Some day his turn may come. If he succeeds in banishing what has always passed as pleasant from the world he will really suffer because there is no more joy to kill. If this is not the end, the public may turn on the moral sadist and make this sort of joy a crime. The wicked like you and me may even learn from the Puritan campaigns. It is not impossible to get satisfaction in the same way that has been so successful in these righteous campaigns. We who have been fond of our own sort of joy may learn from the Puritan in his last orgy of punishment that all sorts of pleasurable emotions are moral sadism. We might all go to jail, together, in one grand passion to substitute sadism for the common and rational pleasures of life.