CHAPTER.XXIII, FAVORS WAR AND CONSTITUTIONAL N the early struggles of the temperance cause one IN of the heaviest blows the liquor people received was the abolition of intoxicants from the army canteen. For years and years thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, were spent in newspaper advertising and in specific literature claiming that removing the drink feature of the canteen from the army had injured the soldiers; that they went away from the camp to the vile drinking-places near to it and poisoned themselves with bad liquor and polluted themselves with evil habits. They insisted most that its removal had greatly increased the social evil. The advertising department of the brewers was so persistent, that it not only wrote its own arguments for insertion in the daily and weekly newspapers, but it also prepared articles which appeared as editorials in many of the cosmopolitan papers. The same editorial, word for word, often appeared in eastern, western, northern and southern daily papers bearing about the same date. During President Roosevelt's administration there was a tremendous attempt to restore drink to the canteen in the army. A leading New York City Republican paper, which had usually been on the right side of moral questions, one day printed an editorial giving in detail the damage that the removal of the canteen had brought and asking for its return to the army. It said, emphatically, that two of the leading members of President Roosevelt's Cabinet were not only in favor of it, but that they intended to use their influence for its restoration. Feeling that it was then time to enter a protest against such a movement I went to the chief to do so. Knowing Colonel Roosevelt's life-long hostility to the saloon, knowing that his whole life was at right angles to what it represented and with faith in his wisdom on such a subject, I went down to Washington, told the President my alarm and asked him if he would not set his foot down on the movement. He said to me, "Do not be alarmed; give yourself no trouble at all on the subject; the removal of the drink from the army was a most fortunate thing for the men themselves and the nation they represent, and I promise you that so long as I am President, or so long as I shall have any influence whatever in the Republican party or in American politics, intoxicants shall never come back into the canteen. You can take the first train back home and feel certain that the nation will not take a back step on such an economic or moral question." Bidding him good-bye, I suggested that it would be an excellent plan for the two able members of his Cabinet, who like some other good men were mistaken on the subject, to lessen their supposed zeal in advocating the claim of the liquor dealers, and thus save his administration from the just criticism of the church people. During the last campaign for the repeal of prohibition in Maine, the liquor people started a rumor that Theodore Roosevelt was about to publish an editorial in the Outlook on the failure of prohibition in Maine. |