The Legislative Hangover of the Anti-Saloon League
How the obsession with prohibition paralyzed the Tacoma legislature and derailed actual governance.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Anti-Saloon League fell to pieces in the house yesterday with a despairing squeak. Outplayed at every stage of the parliamentary game, the drys—once they deserted their standing principle of the county unit—were apparently done for. No longer could they expect to hold the 'solid 51,' for they made morality a question of population and switched their fight from a moral to an economic one. It is doubtful whether some of the '51' were not voting on the assumption from the start that the senate would see to it that no drastic bill became a law. Now that it is over, vainglorious anti-saloon leaguers say they got all they ever expected, but if this is true, to the Anti-Saloon League door must be laid the inefficiency of the legislature just drawing to a close. Certain it is that local option has spoiled whatever other legislation there has been. Important legislation has been held back until now it is too late, because members of the legislature were afraid to trust their bills to the mercies of local option fanatics or liberal dervishes. A bill like the present one could have passed both bodies within ten days after the legislature convened, and there never would have been the cut-throat spirit engendered that now holds sway in both branches.
“A good many snide deals have gone through under the protecting cloak of local option.”
Early 20th-century Washington politics were dominated by the 'Local Option' movement—a precursor to Prohibition that allowed counties to ban alcohol. The legislative gridlock described here, where single-issue moral crusades hijacked the entire state agenda, echoes the way modern legislative bodies can grind to a halt over polarizing cultural wedge issues at the expense of substantive policy.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.