FROM THE ARCHIVES:Fresh from accompanying President W.T. Cosgrave on an official visit to the United States, an anonymous reporter described the reality of Prohibition and how it wasnt working in America.
It is not an exceptional experience to enter any New York restaurant of an evening and find the average diner help himself or herself frequently and quite openly from a flask which makes no furtive return to the hip-pocket or handbag whence it came; nor need a visitor, whether he find himself in a busy city office or merely chatting with a chance acquaintance in the foyer of his hotel, express any astonishment at being requested to come and have a highball or a cocktail before lunch; nor need he feel a momentary weakness if a highly respectable mother in her own highly respected household tender him a glass of beer-home-brew and straight off the ice, as she explains; nor if he be escorted to any fashionable (or unfashionable) night club for supper and dance, need he pain his friend by asking in the hearing of the elegant, but discreet headwaiter, whether all these bottles on the adjoining tables contain the specific fluids accredited to them by their labels.
If there is one thing more than another of which I became convinced in America it was the ease and convenience with which either native or visitor could poison himself. Lest I be taken to cast reflection on that great and ever-growing section of the American public, the keepers of the speak-easies, I should say at once that I am not now apportioning responsibility for that state of things, and that, if I were, I could scarcely ask them to shoulder more than half of it. In strict justice to them I will even say that yearly they save thousands of potential home-brewers from themselves. This same saving grace it is, perhaps, that commends them to authoritys blind eye; for I am told that they are seldom raided.
No place of business, I think, has been more aptly named than the speak easy. It was not the least of my astonishment that when conducted for the first time to one of them I beheld two or three policemen reclining in grateful attitudes against the counter drinking their small glasses of rye whiskey. I learnt from my journalist guide that it was no part of the policemans duty to bother about this sort of liquor traffic. It was the job of the Federal agents, and, any way, there was a lotta graft in the whole thing and no speak-easy need be raided if the proprietor knew his business. I saw very little difference between the interior of the speak-easy and that of any Irish public-house.
It had the usual bar fittings plus a picture of Dr. Douglas Hyde, and men stood round talking and drinking their glasses of beer as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I should mention that business was carried on under cover of a trade in confectionery, which trade was conducted, but not very busily, in the part of the premises opening immediately on the street.
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