Word: volstead
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...question is not", he goes on to say, "whether the 'Volstead Act' is wise or unwise in its provisions, but whether or not the Constitution of the United States shall be conscientiously upheld and a lawful enabling statute enacted thereunder shall be obeyed...
...Angell attempted to make the Student Council take up the problem of undergraduate drinking, but his maneuver met with unfortunate results. In addressing the freshman class he announced that expulsion would follow the defection of any violation of the rule forbidding liquor in university buildings, and incidentally of the Volstead law. This decisive utterance puts the issue clearly, and no future offender will have just cause for complaint. Indeed, it would seem that the only way in which the collegiate public can be wooed from violating an unpopular ordinance will be by unhesitating use of power even at the cost...
Prior to the Volstead act the colleges had their own code regarding drink. It was forbidden to bring intoxicants into university buildings. Drunkenness, if public, was "conduct unbecoming a scholar and a gentleman." Moreover, the man who was publicly intoxicated lost caste with his fellows. They made a nice distinction between the celebration of football victories, club elections and the like, and real addiction to drink. This state of affairs was the culmination of fifty years of growing moderation. The old days when the few men were drunkards, and the many teetotalers were yielding to an almost European practice...
...comment printed below, the New York Times expresses its editorial alarm at the extent of drunkenness in Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and in "other seats of learning", since the passage of the Volstead Act. It admits that "precise data" is hard to get; but it argues from indications and from "reports". It draws its own inferences, first that prohibition in general is a failure in the colleges and second that college authorities should take it upon themselves to eradicate all drinking and drunkenness among students. For, it says, in the good old days there was little or no trouble...
...reports. But as a matter of fact the character of men and of students probably changes very little in the passage of a generation, and it seems to be stretching the point to say that drunkenness has increased much even since "that evil day" when the Volstead Act was passed. The stories which "old grads" love to tell, the cartoons which Lampy printed long ago, the accounts of celebrations after former football games, all seem to indicate that the flowing bowl was as freely partaken of then...