Hobson began his postrelease lecture tour in front of a sold-out audience at the Metropolitan Opera. He wrote a four-part series about his war experience in Century magazine. He allowed a Boston sheet-music publisher to issue “Hobson of the Merrimac: Waltzes for Piano”; its cover featured a photograph of the handsome hero in three-quarter profile—serious of mien, erect of posture, the “smouldering fierceness of his eyes” (if only the printer had been able to replicate their steely blue!) focused slightly to his left, fixed on . . . well, perhaps on the very near future. As he traveled across the country to San Francisco, where he would embark for his next naval posting in the Far East, a newspaper report noted that he had kissed a young woman at one of his appearances. Within days the nation’s hero-hungry press had decided that Hobson’s osculatory skill matched his military prowess, and sold thousands of newspapers in celebration of it. Flocks of women lined up on depot platforms to kiss him—163 in Chicago, 419 in Kansas City, 350 more in Topeka. By the time he got to Denver, he had had enough. “When the kissing is fast and furious it sometimes gets just a little tiresome,” he told a reporter. “It sometimes happens that when some ancient lips are presented I would fain pass them by unkissed, but when I start in I have to take it as it comes. There is no selecting; everything goes.”
“Fain pass them by”? This was of a piece with “contumely” and various other Hobsonisms that even in the early 1900s veered toward the archaic. But the particularity of his language, the righteous fire of his delivery, and preparation that would have done credit to a surgeon—he timed his speeches precisely to the second—made him an irresistible orator. After returning from the Far East (where he endured another round of Coventry, this one administered by officers resentful of his celebrity), he went home to Alabama and Magnolia Grove, the magnificent family plantation ninety miles southwest of Birmingham, and began a life in politics.
Hobson entered the House of Representatives in 1906 and, like so many other drys, almost immediately lined up with the progressives. He opposed the tariff, sought to break up industrial trusts, introduced a resolution calling for the abolition of the Electoral College, and supported both the income tax and woman suffrage.* He was also the House’s leading advocate of a strong navy, and with uncanny foresight predicted in 1911 that Japan would one day attack the Pacific fleet. His defining issue, the one that made him one of the most popular platform speakers of the day, was the elimination of the trade in alcoholic beverages. But the one that would eventually determine the arc of his political career was, for a southern politician in the early twentieth century, a fairly enlightened position on race.
Hobson’s racial attitudes intersected with his military allegiance. He introduced one bill that would have made it illegal in the District of Columbia to discriminate against any uniformed member of the armed forces, white or black, and another to open Annapolis and West Point to students from the Philippines and Puerto Rico, after both had become U.S. colonies. These positions were surprising to many of his southern colleagues, but not nearly as much as Hobson’s public criticism of the dishonorable discharges Theodore Roosevelt meted out to the members of an all-black regiment that had been implicated on spurious charges in the Brownsville Affair of 1906.** Rising on the floor of the House despite the warnings of friends, Hobson addressed the plight of the 167 black soldiers, forever barred from military or civil service. “I saw black men carry our flag on Santiago Hill,” he declared. “I have seen them at Manila. A black man took my father, wounded, from the field of Chancellorsville.” Invoking a paternalism that is discomfiting to modern sensibilities, he spoke of the former slaves who had stayed at Magnolia Grove to care for his mother and grandmother. He also said that because “the white man is supreme in this country,” it was the white man’s responsibility to “give absolute justice to the black man.” Then Hobson concluded with words that, for an Alabama Democrat in 1909, would have been no less remarkable had they advocated immediate and complete integration. “We are standing here on the field of eternal justice,” he said, “where all men are the same.”
He would pay for it. Five years later, in an effort to move up to a vacant Senate seat, Hobson faced off in the Democratic primary against his House colleague Oscar W. Underwood, who opposed Prohibition on the grounds that it was an infringement of states’ rights. Underwood won the backing of the state’s liquor dealers and didn’t bother to hide his wetness from the voters. This wasn’t because he believed Alabama had suddenly gone moist, but because he had a more effective weapon. As much as white Alabamans cared about the liquor question, they cared more about the race issue.
Hobson was hardly a race liberal. In his celebrated and endlessly repeated platform oration, “Alcohol, the Great Destroyer,” which he delivered on the floor of the House for the first time in 1911, he had even warned that liquor could turn black men into cannibals. But Underwood and his supporters used Hobson’s advocacy for the Brownsville soldiers, and his other slightly moderate views on blacks in the military, like a bludgeon. They attacked Hobson as “the only Southerner in Congress to stab his people on the great issue” and insisted that his positions would lead inexorably to “the national enfranchisement of the negro.” Underwood’s campaign literature reached its rhetorical pinnacle, or nadir, on the service academy issue. Admitting Filipinos—whom campaign literature characterized as “negroes, negritos, and negorillas”—to West Point or Annapolis would mean “exact social equality! In the same room! At the same table with our boys!”
On primary day, race trumped booze: Underwood overwhelmed Hobson, taking 62 percent of the vote. This was just four months after Hobson had greeted the marching members of the ASL and the WCTU on the Capitol steps on the day he formally introduced his constitutional amendment. After his defeat the Hobson Amendment, as it became known, lay untouched in the Judiciary Committee, a grenade that might explode on contact with any politician whose district was not overwhelmingly wet or dry—in other words, the sort of district for which the tactics of the ASL had been devised. And by all conventional measurements, the legislative potency of the amendment’s lame-duck sponsor was approaching zero.
IN THE HOUSE of Representatives on December 22, 1914, the day Hobson would lead the debate on his resolution for a constitutional amendment, Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri gaveled the House to order with an unusual admonition: “There are going to be ten mortal hours of speech making here today, and maybe more,” Clark announced. “And some of it, perhaps, will be rather lively, and the chair asks members to help keep order, and the people in the galleries, too.” This was understandable: the galleries were jammed with battalions of pilgrims, most of them women, who occupied every seat and crowded every aisle. What appeared to be a large banner suspended from the railing of the south gallery was in fact a petition, and if any of the men slowly filing into the House chamber had been able to get close to it, they would have seen that the twelve thousand signatures on the enormous document were not those of individuals, but of organizations.
This should not suggest that getting the measure to this point—an actual floor debate, with an actual vote to follow—had been anything but a murderously difficult task. The months it had taken to extract the Prohibition resolution from the fearful members of the Judiciary Committee were an indication of Hobson’s weakened position. His legislative hopes to a large degree rested in the hands of the majority leader, who shared with the Speaker responsibility for scheduling floor debates and votes. The leader happened to be the wet Oscar Underwood, the man who had sent Hobson tumbling toward retirement.
But Hobson was not without resources. He knew that less than three weeks earlier, Speaker Clark had been delivering a speech to the Detroit Board of Commerce when his hosts had felt it necessary to turn off the lights and cut him short. Clark was so drunk he had lapsed into incoherence, his words slurred, his gestures unsteady. The New York Times described the event with a respectful delicacy: “Mr. Clark began his address but faltered and was plainly se
en to be indisposed.” Hobson was similarly respectful, but for different reasons. When news of Clark’s indiscretion reached him, Hobson immediately sent out a flight of telegrams to his dry allies. He asked them to “omit all references to Speaker Clark’s experience in Detroit” in their speechmaking and other publicity efforts. He said this was “in accord with Christian principles,” but he added that discretion “may have an important bearing upon the Speaker’s future relations with our cause. I regard this as very important.” Blackmail usually is.
The “ten mortal hours of speech making” that Clark decreed on December 22 accommodated the remarks of more than fifty members of the House. They were not temperate in their comments. W. W. Rucker of Missouri shouted in behalf of Hobson’s resolution that it was time to “quit this degeneration of mankind!” Minority leader James Mann of Illinois, speaking against, warned that Prohibition would bring about “an army of government spies, with every township in the country under surveillance.” Martin A. Morrison of Indiana, who was somewhere in between, said the day should be called “the Slaughter of the Innocents,” for how they voted would end the political careers, he estimated, of more than a hundred of his colleagues.
All day long members came and went, to get dinner or to leaf grimly through the stacks of cards, letters, and telegrams piling in drifts in their offices. On the House floor, pages raced back and forth. Some brought more telegrams; some delivered fistfuls of the pink postcards that had been distributed in the hundreds of thousands by Prohibition activists, each bearing the picture of an innocent (and presumably vulnerable) child. Always Hobson remained at his desk. He accepted flowers sent by some of the women in the galleries. He ate a sandwich.
As the measure’s floor manager, Hobson had addressed the House early in the day. Six feet tall, his sandy hair thinning on top, his eyes drawn into their characteristic squint, he leaned forward on the balls of his feet as he spoke to his colleagues. It was the posture he had perfected on the lecture stage while declaiming “Alcohol, the Great Destroyer.” On this December Tuesday, his colleagues knew it was likely the last time they would hear the Hero of the Merrimac call down the heavens with his famous speech.
“What is the object of this resolution?” he began, his deep baritone ringing with purpose. “It is to destroy the agency that debauches the youth of the land and thereby perpetuates its hold on the nation.” He argued that because his amendment forbade only the use, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol “for sale”—critical words—it was not coercive; it would not prevent men and women from making and drinking their own. Less ingenuously, he picked up a refrain that had become increasingly popular among congressional drys, saying he wasn’t even asking members to vote for or against liquor, only to allow the state legislatures the opportunity to pass judgment on the amendment. Therefore, he insisted, any congressman who voted against the resolution would be voting “to deny the States and the people their right of referendum.”
But most of the speech was a replay of “The Great Destroyer.” He proceeded through many of the tropes that had thrilled and horrified his audiences for years. He explained that alcohol is “a loathsome excretion of a living organism”; that it will make a civilized young man successively “become semicivilized, semisavage, savage, and, at last, below the brute”; that “nearly two-thirds of all the money in circulation in America in the course of a year” passed through the grasping hands of the liquor trust. He described how alcohol corrupted family life, deformed the economy, and befouled politics and government. He claimed that “there are nearly twice as many slaves, largely white men, today than there were black men slaves in America at any one time”—slaves, of course, to the alcohol demon.
Finally Hobson concluded, not with his customary invocation of the Lord of Hosts, but with a challenge to the men whose ranks he would soon be leaving. “In the name of your manhood,” he told his colleagues, “in the name of your patriotism, in the name of all that is held dear by good men, in the name of your fireside, in the name of our institutions, in the name of our country, and in the name of humanity and humanity’s God, I call on you to join hands with me and each one to do his full duty.”
On the rostrum, Speaker Clark did not gavel the galleries into silence. He may have been thinking how he had compromised himself in Detroit. But he also might have been recalling what he had said to reporters on that unfortunate day. Hobson, he had told them, was “a knight errant,” Clark said. “Had he lived in the days of chivalry he would have been one of those who went in search of the Holy Grail. In our day, confronting our problems, he is a political lunatic.”
Clark had especially wanted to make sure that his listeners understood what he thought of Hobson’s prediction that nationwide Prohibition was just ten years away. After a pause, he pressed his point. “Have you got that?” Clark asked the reporters. “Hobson is a lunatic.”
THE MORNING OF the debate, the Chicago Tribune’s Washington correspondent had predicted that some members would claim illness to avoid having to show up at the Capitol Building and others would find it “imperative to leave Washington a day earlier than they had contemplated in order to keep their Christmas engagements.” But it turned out that 90 percent of the House was well enough to come to work, apparently prepared for what the man from the Tribune called “political judgment day for the 433 members of the House—at least for such of them as expect to be candidates again for public office.” The final vote on the Hobson Amendment was 197 for, 190 against—not the two-thirds majority the Constitution required, but an astonishing result nonetheless. Because the measure failed in the House, it did not come to a vote in the Senate during that congressional session. But if there were an antonym for Pyrrhic victory, headline writers would have plundered it hungrily. In losing this first real test of a Prohibition amendment, the dry forces had won. Dry votes came from both parties and from every part of the country. Nearly two-thirds of the affirmative voters lived in towns with fewer than ten thousand people, but that shouldn’t suggest the dominance of rural conservatives; among members of the Progressive Party in the House, seventeen of the eighteen who voted went dry.
The editors of the Nation, who admired Hobson’s passion (and his principled valor during the Brownsville controversy), said he “fought not for results but for causes,” and on this day his cause was triumphant. He had experienced an equally glorious defeat once before, when he was imprisoned by the Spanish navy. He called the feeling that gripped him then “the ecstasy of martyrdom.”
Hobson’s last major speech in his final weeks in the House was a vein-popper in behalf of woman suffrage. In his first notable oration after he returned to private life, he again invoked the suffrage cause, but this time in the service of a greater passion. “Seek the enfranchisement of women everywhere,” Hobson shouted from the podium at the 1915 ASL convention in Atlantic City, unreeling an inventory of urgent imperatives. “Make general use of the government frank in sending out dry speeches and other documents. Request all papers and periodicals to decline liquor advertisements. . . . Call the Salvation Army into action. . . . Develop local fights so as to produce the best effect on the national field.”
Then: “Take the offensive everywhere,” Hobson cried as he brought his philippic to its close and his audience to its feet. “Attack! Attack! Attack!”
THAT 1915 ASL CONVENTION was like none that had preceded it. The fire stoked by the symbolic triumph of the Hobson Amendment warmed old campaigners and drew new ones to its brightening glow. The former heavyweight champion (and former heavyweight drunk) John L. Sullivan, whose framed likeness was once almost as common in American saloons as Custer’s Last Fight, spoke in behalf of the cause. Delegates accepted a resolution of solidarity from a new organization called the Catholic Prohibition League of America, which unconvincingly claimed a membership of thirty thousand. Dr. J. H. Kellogg, the famous physician from Battle Creek who had placed cornflakes on the American breakfast table, came to speak; Booker T. Washington
, who believed liquor a particular scourge among blacks, sent felicitations. An especially fervent chorus of cheers rang out when a speaker quoted British prime minister David Lloyd George, whose country had been at war for a year: “We are fighting the Germans, the Austrians, and drink,” Lloyd George had declared, “and the deadliest of these is drink.”
The spread of temperance sentiment in other countries—especially while World War I raged across Europe—was, for the ASL, evidence that its members were marching in step with a worldwide army of the righteous. Lloyd George never tried to institute actual Prohibition in Britain, but he did employ wartime pleas to patriotism in what the Atlantic Monthly called a “heroic onslaught” against booze, evidenced by a series of trade regulations and sumptuary laws that restricted alcohol consumption. These included a sevenfold increase in excise taxes and the imposition of the peculiar schedule of pub closing hours—not revoked until 2005—that added a phrase to the repertoire of every British bartender: “Time, gentlemen, please.” Other countries (all of them northern, none of them Catholic) were gripped by what a French economist described as “le delirium anti-alcoolique.” The new temperance laws included the issuance of individual “drinking licenses” in Sweden, the suspension of liquor sales in German industrial areas, and the suspension of all liquor sales in Iceland (a ruling revoked, at least insofar as Spanish wine was concerned, when the Spaniards retaliated by tripling import duties on Icelandic fish). Norway and Finland would both have a form of Prohibition in place before the decade was over, and provincial Prohibition laws would sweep across all of Canada save for Catholic Quebec.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 10