Taking the Constitution to Task: Pauline Morton Smith Sabin Davis

1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

— The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Ratified January 16, 1919

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“Once during prohibition,” W. C. Fields stated, “I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.” For the thousands like Fields who bemoaned prohibition, proactively operated illegal stills, and drank gin from bathtubs, there were many enforcers, but individuals willing to fight against the new law were few. Pauline Morton Smith Sabin (later Davis) was one of those individuals willing to wage war against prohibition.

Prohibition, ironically, landed in America just as the nation should have been celebrating—at the end of the Great War—and left America as the nation was in the throes of a horrible depression, hardly a time to celebrate with a drink. Pauline Sabin’s fight against prohibition began in the late 1920s, although it was cloaked in support of Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential candidacy. Historian Daniel Okrent, in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, describes the tricky posturing at work in Sabin’s politics:

Pauline Sabin had been among those wet and wealthy Republicans who had stayed loyal to Hoover during the 1928 race. Many of them either had not yet placed Prohibition ahead of other issues at play in the campaign or had chosen to believe that a man as worldly and as educated as Hoover couldn’t possibly be a genuine dry. In June 1928 Sabin had announced her leap to the wet side in a magazine article headlined “I Change My Mind on Prohibition.” Sabin explained the reasoning behind her switch, and went on to criticize dry women blinded by their devotion to this one cause.

Her reasoning and hopes, Okrent goes on to explain, were “shredded” when Hoover demanded compliance to the law. On March 4, 1929, Hoover stated in his inaugural address:

I have been selected by you to execute and enforce the laws of the country. I propose to do so to the extent of my own abilities, but the measure of success that the Government shall attain will depend upon the moral support which you, as citizens, extend. No greater national service can be given by men and women of good will—who, I know, are not unmindful of the responsibilities of citizenship—than that they should, by their example, assist in stamping out crime and outlawry by refusing participation in and condemning all transactions with illegal liquor.

Pauline Sabin’s argument was very simple: alcohol and its consumption was the problem of the consumer or the would-be consumer, and not the government. In a New York Times interview with Samuel Johnson Woolf, she argued, “When prohibition was first enacted, I was in favor of it. . . . I had two sons and felt that for their benefit, at least I should approve it.”

However, Sabin was not a proponent of government interference or big government—she was the president of the Women’s National Republican Club— and she amended her position later, noting, “I began to see that whether my boys drank or not was my responsibility and not the government’s.”

Sabin’s efforts toward prohibition reform were widely recognized. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, Pauline Sabin rechanneled her advocacy in many directions, among them the American Red Cross and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

Pauline Morton Smith Sabin Davis by Philip Alexius de Laszlo [from 1926] is on view in the exhibition “Capital Portraits” through Monday, September 5, 2011 at the National Portrait Gallery.

 

Pauline Morton Sabin / Philip Alexius de László / Oil on canvas, 1928 / Sheila Smith Cochran / Photograph by Alex Jamison Photography

 

Cited:
Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner’s, 2010).

S. J. Woolf, “A Woman Crusader for the Wet Cause,” New York Times, May 8, 1932.

Herbert Hoover, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1929