Happy Repeal Day!
December 5, 2007
Yay!
On December 5th, 1933, Utah, the final state needed for a three quarters majority, ratified the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition and restoring the American right to a celebratory drink.
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In honor of Repeal Day, I offer the following poem by G.K. Chesterton
A Logical Vegetarian
YOU will find me drinking rum,
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian.
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.
So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.
Oh, I knew a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.
I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.
No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian;
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very
So very, very, very Vegetarian.
I’ll drink to that.
Cheers!
I’m happy that my weekly bluegrass and beer night fell on Repeal Day. Cheers!
Bluegrass and beer. A couple of things we have in common. Toss back one for me.
Has anybody read Murray Rothbard’s hermeneutically-suspicious interpretation of Prohibition? He claims it was a conflict between pietistic and liturgical Christians. The bars were a political and community center for immigrants, and shutting them down severely hampered Catholics and Lutherans’ efforts to organize themselves.
Perhaps it was due to prohibition that the Knights of Columbus denied membership to my great-grandfather because he had been a bartender.
“Perhaps it was due to prohibition that the Knights of Columbus denied membership to my great-grandfather because he had been a bartender”
You’re kidding me! Who woulda thunk it?
I seriously cannot believe there was a time in this country when alcohol was illegal, given how much goes nowadays. I just cannot fathom it.
The first group of Knights in New Haven, CT were taken mostly from the Saint Mary’s Total Abstinence Society–so the temperance movement and the K of C have a long history together.
Kevin Jones might be particularly interested to know that J. K. Mullen, one of the founders of the Knights in Denver, and the chief philanthropist behind getting the local Cathedral built, was a total abstainer.
Of course the Knights in Denver now have their own bar.
Ummm….not that it wasn’t a funny, clever poem…but did anyone else notice the anti-Semitism in it?? I.e. Dr. Gluck, the non-Aryan with the hooked nose who was given pork??
“J. K. Mullen, one of the founders of the Knights in Denver, and the chief philanthropist behind getting the local Cathedral built, was a total abstainer.”
Wow. There’s a story in a history of the Klan in Colorado that tells how a priest at St. Anne’s in Arvada was apparently using the religious exemption in Prohibition laws to bootleg. Mullen’s daughter was somehow involved in the scheme. Your information makes the story even better.