Crusaders' Map of Year's Still Seizures
- Title:
- Crusaders' Map of Year's Still Seizures
- Alternate Title:
- Crusaders' Map of Year's Still Seizures
- Collection:
- Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection
- Creator:
- The Crusaders
- Date:
- 1931
- Posted Date:
- 2017-04-14
- ID Number:
- 2268.01
- Collection Number:
- 8548
- File Name:
- PJM_2268_01.jpg
- Style/Period:
- 1920 - 1939
- Subject:
- Alcohol
- Measurement:
- 11 x 16 on page 57 x 45 (centimeters, height x width)
- Notes:
- Toward the end of the Great Experiment, the New York Times published this article based on a report of the "Crusaders, a movement of younger men opposed to prohibition." The Crusaders' report focused on the hypocrisy of the dry movement (apparently without using that word), noting that there were dramatically more seizures of stills in the traditionally "dry" portions of the country. "The Southern States were so over-loaded with stills that our map-making department experienced material mechanical difficulty in showing the requisite dots in the scale space limits allotted to Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida." Based on these statistics, the Crusaders concluded that illegal distillation was "decidedly under par in the wet sections of the United States, but booming in the dry belt." The Crusaders were pointed in discussing the role of federal officials: "Although President Hoover has in the past voiced the hope that the capital of the nation would prove itself a model prohibition city, it must be admitted, reluctantly, that Washington has not justified White House confidence in her dry virtue. Police records here prove that dry-voting, wet-drinking Senators and Representatives have active rivals among the more than half a million disfranchised citizens of this community, who seem to drink more energetically than citizens of some States vote." The report quotes former Director of Prohibition Lincoln Andrews, who concluded that the stills operating in the U.S. were sufficient "to provide an inferior substitute for the once legal whiskey which paid the American Government each year a revenue sufficient to offset the need for an income tax."
Note that one could take issue with the Crusaders' report on at least two grounds. First, the map shows that some historically dry states - Kansas, Oklahoma and Utah, for example - had dramatically fewer seizures than the dry states of the southeastern U.S., suggesting that the differences may have had more to do with regional custom than anything else. Second, it's possible that seizures were more common in traditionally dry states because the local population was more willing to report violations than those living in wet states, and therefore that "more seizures" didn't necessarily correlate with "more distillation."
The collection includes a number of other Prohibition-related maps; see Subjects > Alcohol.
For further information on the Collector’s Notes and a Feedback/Contact Link, see https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/content/about-collection-personal-statement and https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/content/feedback-and-contact - Source:
- New York Times, May 3, 1931, p. 2.
- Cite As:
- P.J. Mode collection of persuasive cartography, #8548. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
- Repository:
- Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library
- Archival Collection:
- P.J. Mode collection of persuasive cartography
- Format:
- Image
- Rights:
- For important information about copyright and use, see http://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/copyright.