Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

done with the clerks of the committee.

I don't remember the women's position on Prohibition, but I seem to think that we were pretty well united by 1924 that it was a mistake. If we weren't united, then it was a matter that we didn't take any action on because we weren't united and couldn't be united. I remember hearing in our committee some defense of the law and some defense of the idea that if given time and properly enforced it would be all right. I remember that Virginia Potter was violently opposed to the Prohibition law and for any amendment. She was great for liberty and so forth. I don't recall what our general opinion was, but there were certainly a great many of us who thought that the Prohibition law could never honestly be enforced, that it went too basically into the regulation of things that were a part of a man's control of his own life. When you did that, you just got a situation that made all kinds of graft and corruption easy.

We were greatly alarmed in New York by that time by the way things were developing and by the crime and drunkeness that we saw among respectable people who never thought of drinking before. I still don't know why they did. I've often wondered. But they did. There's no question about that. However, I don't think we had a universal opinion on that.





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help