Volstead Act

Exactly.

By the way, do you know the anniversary of the day that the Volstead Act was revoked and prohibition was officially over?

I don't remember if it was

December

By this time, Anne's brother Orville was a major figure in Pasadena, California bootlegging.

In 1924, he was arrested along with several others in a huge orgali- organized violation of the Volstead Act.

Perhaps it was this devil-may-care criminality that inspired Anne Forrester to kidnap her own son in 1928.

The child, now 10 years old, was living with his grandmother Wills.

His basement was where he kept the hooch.

Prohibition was in its second year of enforcement, and per the dreaded Volstead Act, anyone caught imbibing in, possessing, transporting, or manufacturing booze found themselves in a world of hurt.

The hurt would come either courtesy of Johnny Law, who would haul your law-breaking ass off to the slammer, or via a less subtle, more holy fuck-I'm-gonna-die kind of pain, typically brought on by a swig of questionable white lightning from a dirty bottle you procured through the less-than-advisable channels.

For the rich, like Roscoe Arbuckle, the Volstead Act was a non-issue.

Money changes everything, they say, and that includes the ability to procure decent booze in even the darkest of times.

All it took was an appropriate amount of greenbacks smushed into the meat hooks of the right person.

It is high time that thinking people went beyond the mere recognition of this fact and entered into a serious examination of the cause to which it is to be ascribed.

perhaps i should say the causes for of course more causes than one enter into the matter but i say the cause for the reason that there is one cause which transcends all others both in underlying importance and in the permanence of its nature that cause does not reside in any special extravagances that there may be in the volstead act the cardinal grievance against which the unprecedented contempt for law among high-minded and law-abiding people is directed is not the volstead act but the eighteenth amendment the enactment of that amendment was a monstrosity so gross that no thinking american thirty years ago would have regarded it as a possibility it is not only a crime against the constitution of the united states and not only a crime against the whole spirit of our federal system but a crime against the first principles of rational government the object of the constitution of the united states is to embed in the organic law of the country certain principles and certain arrangements for the distribution of power which shall be binding in a peculiar way upon generation after generation of the american people Once so embedded, it may prove to be impossible by anything short of a revolution to get them out, even though a very great majority of the people should desire to do so.

If laws regulating the ordinary personal conduct of individuals are to be entrenched in this way, one of the first conditions of respect for law necessarily falls to the ground.

that practical maxim which is always appealed to, and rightly appealed to, in behalf of an unpopular law, the maxim that if the law is bad, the way to get it repealed is to obey it and enforce it, loses its validity.

And in a case where the edict violates principles which almost all of us only a short time ago held to be almost sacred, the expectation is worse than merely idle.

A nation which could instantly get itself into the frame of mind necessary for such supine submission would be a nation fit for servitude, not freedom.

But in the case of the Prohibition Amendment and of the Volstead Act for its enforcement, there enters another element which must inevitably and most powerfully affect the feelings of men towards the law.

Everybody knows that the law is violated, in spirit if not in letter, by a large proportion of the very men who imposed it upon the country.

Unfortunately.

The Volstead Act of 1919 eliminates legal alcohol from American life.

I feel like I always forget when Prohibition was, 1919 to 1933.

I need to lock that in my memory.

I understand the reasoning and Scalia's reasoning and the rendering of the case.

But what I am saying, by repealing the 1907 Volstead Act or whatever it was, you opened a Pandora's box and where now if you look at the legislative agenda, it's big business, it's big food, it's big pharma.

You're getting tax cuts for certain people that are paying.

You're allowed to put glyphosate in the children's cereals.

Al Capone likely felt this addition to Big Pill's platform was as ridiculous as most people did, but another of Thompson's issues received his full support.

Thompson loudly bragged on stage in open violation of Prohibition and the Volstead Act, I'm wetter than the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

When I'm elected, we'll not only reopen places the Deaver administration had closed, but we'll have 10,000 new ones.

Capone was so enthused about that process that he contributed $250,000 to Thompson's campaign fund.