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THE PROHIBITION ENFORCEMENT UNIT

Address by Hon. William D. Foulke

(This address was made to the Council of the League at its meeting Tuesday evening, May 10, 1927, preceding the annual meeting of the League.)

When Roy A. Haynes, who was for years one of the distributors of the political plunder of the Prohibition Unit, is to be given authority to carry out and enforce the Civil Service Act, the purpose of which is to suppress such plunder, what shall we say as to the prospect of his success?

When Haynes took charge of the Prohibition Enforcement Service at the beginning of the Harding administration he found it full of Democrats because the Volstead Act had excepted those places from the Civil Servce law and made them the political patronage of Democratic Congressmen and other machine politicans. Haynes, as well as the Anti-Saloon League (which secured his appointment), had urged the passage of the Volstead Act in just that shape. Not a whimper of protest was made by any of them against the infamous clause which excepted these places in the Field Service from Civil Service tests of fitness. Evidently they wanted these places because they hoped to control them politically. A Republican administration was coming in and the Anti-Saloon League, which turned out to be a political organization in the worst sense as well as in the best, chose Haynes to manipulate this patronage in their favor. With him they hoped to "rule the roost." So when he took office he made a "clean sweep" according to the most depraved model of the old spoils system. All the Democrats were turned out. Many of them were corrupt and deserved it, but good and bad all had to go, and Republican scoundrels in

even greater proportion took the places of the bad Democrats, until the administration of this branch of the service became, in President Harding's own words, "A National Scandal."

Our own Civil Service Reform League did what it could to stem the tide of corruption. Our secretary, Mr. Harry W. Marsh, remonstrated with Volstead before the bill passed, but Volstead wanted the spoils and got it. Marsh remonstrated with Wayne B. Wheeler, but was told that any change was “impracticable." Richard H. Dana, our former President, warned the country in his annual address that this system "creates a political partisan force sure, as experience shows, to be incompetent, ineffective, blind-eyed and blackmailing." Mr. Marsh asked Mr. Haynes himself to co-operate in securing the competitive system, but Haynes refused. Our League prepared a bill classifying the entire Prohibition service and requiring new examinations. This was introduced as early as April, 1921 (Senate bill 1376), but neither Haynes nor Wheeler nor the Anti-Saloon League gave it any support, while Haynes' own proposed bill (Senate bill 3247) provided that all the precious set then in office under him were to be transferred to the classified service and continued in their positions without any further examination or test of capacity and honesty, and that all the State directors of Prohibition and other high officials, among whom the greatest corruption had existed, were still to be appointed as political spoils, thus infecting the entire service by their evil example if not by their positive commands.

It will not do to say that the actual appointments were made by the Secretary of the Treasury or by the Internal Revenue Commission. It is well known that the bulk of these appointments were made upon the

recommendation of Mr. Haynes as chief of the Prohibition Enforcement Service and he himself made them mainly upon the solicitation of Congressmen.

Not only did Haynes thus take part in the appointment of numbers of the depraved political retainers who filled the service, but he kept assuring the public in speeches and reports that they were first class men. I heard him, in August, 1922, in a speech at a Quaker reunion in my own town of Richmond, Indiana, declare that his employes were as "high type a force as was found in the government service," and condemn as "wet" propaganda all disparagement of their work.

On October 4, 1922, the Commissioner issued an official statement that the office of the Prohibition officer in New York State was in excellent condition though that office was then being investigated by a federal grand jury which reported on October 27th that it had been conducted in a disgraceful manner and six of the enforcement officers and twenty-seven of their dependents were indicted for conspiracy for violating the Volstead Act. The grand jury say in their report:

"These appointees, being exempt from civil service law, were appointed and removed without the restrictions which those laws impose and consequently the office seems to have been made the dumping ground for influential politicians who secured appointments for their henchmen without proper regard for the qualifications of those chosen."

A chronology of the notorious violations of the law under Haynes presents an appalling array.

After concealment was no longer possible and it became necessary to confess that violations of the law were widespread and dangerous, Haynes still insisted

that this was the fault of others-of lax enforcement by state and local officials and of general wickedness. That his own force of corrupt spoilsmen was at the bottom of the lawlessness-this he was still unwilling to confess.

In his twenty-first installment of "Prohibition Inside Out," published first in the New York Times and then in a book of his own, he thus refers to the derelictions in his own service:

"As the result of temptation in scores of forms and unceasingly offered, forty-three officers of the prohibition unit have been adjudged guilty by the courts since the beginning of the administration. Even so, the force was 99 per cent honest."

A more outrageously disingenuous and misleading statement it would be hard to conceive. Because only one per cent had been actually convicted, therefore 99 per cent were honest! Did Mr. Haynes know the percentage of convictions in other crimes? The report of the committee of the Bar Association at Minneapolis that same year told us that the year before in New York two hundred and sixty murders were committed and three convictions were obtained! In his very next article Mr. Haynes says the number of corrupt state officers is large and "those who have been caught are doubtless but a fraction of those who are guilty," yet he would have us believe that he has caught and punished all the guilty in his own service. Mr. Haynes said, "Of real corruption the percentage stands at about one-half of one per cent." He said nothing of the "almost numberless cases" mentioned by President Harding in which "immediate dismissal" was necessary, nor of the Rhode Island service which had to be reorganized from top to bottom; nor of New York, where one director after another, with their

chief subordinates, left the service with the marks of infamy upon them; nor of Pennsylvania, where subordinates were actually dismissed by those higher up because they tried to enforce the law; nor of Montana, Wisconsin and elsewhere, where his chief officers were found faithless. It has been the common consciousness of the country that a great proportion of his service was rotten to the core.

On July 1, 1923, Commissioner Haynes dismissed in New York, eighteen Prohibition agents because they were "non-producers." But the new appointments to fill their places were filled by the same political methods which created this non-production.

But in spite of his desire to make them as small as possible, Mr. Haynes' account itself showed the enormous number of law violations, the importations of liquor from the Bahamas; the traffic from St. Pierre, the natives becoming rich out of the profit; the farmers who had "not raised a hundred dollars' worth of produce in years who now have fine touring cars"; the wild parties of rum-runners in which women participated. He tells us of a possible minimum of one million and a half gallons of importations for 1922; he describes the wholesale smuggling at Detroit; the wholesale importations from Montreal across the New York border; he declared that Canada received many millions in taxes from these importations. He described the highjackers who robbed and murdered the bootleggers-the piracy which he said was rampant from the Caribbeans to Newfoundland as well as in the Great Lakes and Puget Sound and Mexico. He talked much of protection of bootleggers by officials, but he gave his illustrations from the officials of different states and cities and not from his own subordinates.

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