It's still December 5th where I'm sittin'. Too bad I'm sittin' in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where it remains illegal (w/ a few exceptions) to sell beer, wine or liquor on a Sunday :lol:
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Prohibition Repeal Is Ratified at 5:32 P.M.; Roosevelt Asks Nation to Bar
the Saloon; New York Celebrates With Quiet Restraint
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Washington, Dec. 5 -- Legal liquor today was returned to the United States,
with President Roosevelt calling on the people to see that "this return of
individual freedom shall not be accompanied by the repugnant conditions that
obtained prior to the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment and those that
have existed since its adoption."
Prohibition of alcoholic beverages as a national policy ended at 5:321/2
P.M., Eastern Standard Time, when Utah, the last of the thirty-six States
furnished by vote of its convention the constitutional majority for
ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. The new amendment repealed the
Eighteenth, and with the demise of the latter went the Volstead Act which
for more than a decade held legal drinks in America to less than one-half of
1 percent of alcohol and the enforcement of which cost more than 150 lives
and billions in money.
Earlier in the day, Pennsylvania had ratified as the thirty-fourth State and
Ohio as the thirty-fifth.
Proclamation by President
President Roosevelt at 6:55 P.M., signed an official proclamation in keeping
with terms of the National Industrial Recovery Act, under which prohibition
ended and four taxes levied to raise $277,000,000 annually for amortization
of the $3,300,000,000 public works fund were repealed.
But the President went further. Accepting certification from Acting
Secretary of State Phillips that thirty-six STates had ratified the
repealing amendment, he improved the occasion to address a plea to the
American people to employ their regained liberty first of all for national
manliness.
Mr. Roosevelt asked personally for what he and his party had declined to
make the subject of Federal mandate -- that saloons be barred from the
country.
"I ask especially," he said, "that no State shall, by law or otherwise,
authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern
guise."
Makes Personal Plea
He enjoined all citizens to cooperate with the government in its endeavor to
restore a greater respect for law and oder, especially by confining their
purchases of liquor to duly licensed agencies. This practice, which he
personally requested every individual and every family in the nation to
follow, would result, he said, in a better product for consumption, in
addition to the "break-up and eventual destruction of the notoriously evil
illicit liquor traffic" and in tax benefits to the government.
The President thus announced the policy of his administration -- to see that
the social and political evils of the preprohibition era shall not be
revived or permitted again to exist. Failure of citizens to use their new
freedom in helping to advance this policy, he said, would be "a living
reproach to us all."
He expressed faith, too, in the "good sense of the American people" in
preventing excessive personal use of relegalized liquor. "The objective we
seek through a national policy," he said, "is the education of every citizen
toward a greater temperance throughout the nation."
As a means of enforcing his policy, the President has the Federal Alcohol
Control Administration ready to take control of the liquor traffic and
regulate it at the source of supply.
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Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Religion is just mind control.
--George Carlin, comedian