William Sprague Decision

William Sprague Decision

Farmer William Sprague, 42, town clerk of Wantage, N. J., under indictment for transporting a truck load of beer, was out hunting one afternoon last week when U. S. District Judge William Clark at Newark delivered a long and startling decision in his commonplace case. Concluded Judge Clark's opinion:

We hold the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment to be invalid and the motion to quash the [Sprague] indictment is accordingly granted.

When Farmer Sprague, a free man, got home that night, he read of his victory in big black press headlines while his Wet friends puzzled him with assurances that he was another Dred Scott.* His cocksure comment: "Prohibition's a farce. I always knew the 18th Amendment wasn't constitutional. People should be able to drink what they want." Farmer Sprague & friends began to celebrate what they imagined was the end of Prohibition with heavy draughts of "cider" (applejack). Judge Clark's ruling, however, produced resounding results far beyond Wantage. His was the first Federal Court opinion invalidating the 18th Amendment. It raised new or forgotten points of law and constitutional policy. It "amazed" the Drys, "delighted" the Wets. Though its immediate and practical effects on Prohibition were nil, it started a nationwide discussion of fresh judicial phases of the question. Judge Clark did not come to his momentous conclusion unaided. Local attorneys in the Sprague case were joined by able New York lawyers--Selden Bacon, Julius Henry Cohen, Daniel Florence Cohalan--who since 1927 have been attempting to crack the 18th Amendment from a little-discussed angle--namely, that its ratification by state legislatures was void because it dealt a grant of power to the Federal Government so large that only state conventions of the people themselves could constitutionally approve the transfer. Judge Clark accepted this argument and expanded it into a monumental thesis of his own which packed twelve tight news-columns of print. The Judgment. Judge Clark reasoned as follows: 1) Article V of the Constitution provides for ratification of amendments "by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states or by conventions in three-fourths thereof." 2) Amendment X provides that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people." 3) Prohibition police power belongs to the People and can be delegated only by them to the Federal Government. 4) Such a delegation of power could be constitutionally accomplished only by the People in State conventions called for that purpose as provided by Article V. 5) Because the 18th Amendment was ratified by State legislatures and not by the People themselves it was invalid. Old though the broad contention is that the People (i. e. conventions) should have ratified the 18th Amendment rather than the States (i. e. legislatures), Judge Clark's decision was no close-knit legal argument along this familiar line. Discursively he began: "The traditional method of adopting amendments to the U. S. Constitution is challenged. . . . Even if this opinion meets with a cold reception in the Appellate courts, we hope it will at least have the effect of focussing the country's thought upon the neglected method of considering constitutional amendments in conventions. We have often wished for some statute akin to mortmain to remove the dead hand of tradition from the domain of ideas. . . ." Putting aside "the stereotyped method of constitutional interpretation and construction" and the judicial principle of citing superior decisions (stare decisis] Judge Clark declared: "We are quite willing to stand flatfootedly on our thesis that the scientific approach to this problem of government requires an approval and ratification of certain amendments by and in a convention and that the language of Article V can be taken as modified by the principles of political science." To buttress his views Judge Clark showered his opinion with nonlegal quotations from Confucius, Cicero, Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Lord Bryce, Justice Holmes, James Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Montesquieu, William Howard Taft, Congressman Luce, Claude Bowers, Abbott Lawrence Lowell et al. He quoted a feeble joke from the Georgia Supreme Court. His opinion was a display of wide reading and deep scholarship. Whether or not it was good law was another matter. The Judge. Behind the decision was a tall, angular, sandy-haired man of 39 who has the distinction of being the youngest member of the Federal judiciary. Scion of the rich O N T thread* family, he was born in Newark, learned law at Harvard, served in the A. E. F. He lives quietly in Princeton, has not taken a drink since Prohibition became law. In 1925 President Coolidge appointed him to the bench after the Anti-Saloon League's late great Wayne Bidwell Wheeler had indorsed him as a thoroughgoing Dry. A natural scholar, he assembled years of reading and research in his decision. Thirty-three of his decisions have been carried to higher courts; only three have been reversed. Appeal. Attorney General Mitchell immediately ordered the Sprague case appealed directly to the U. S. Supreme Court for a full test of the points raised against the 18th Amendment. Sweeping aside all the judge's erudite views, the Government flatly contended that he had erred, that the Amendment's ratification had been thoroughly proper and legal. Lay speculation thereafter ran riot in an effort to unearth Supreme Court decisions which would bear directly on the issue. Precedent. In 1920 Elihu Root argued the brewers' case before the Supreme Court. According to Judge Clark, Mr. Root invoked the loth Amendment against the 18th only to show that Prohibition was a "reserved" or forbidden power for the Federal Government, but not to question the validity of its ratification. Mr. Root, said Judge Clark, "proceeded on assumptions entirely foreign to the present controversy." The Anti-Saloon League, on the other hand, insisted that Mr. Root had used the loth Amendment just as it was used by the Sprague defense, and that the Supreme Court, upholding the 18th Amendment against Mr. Root's attack, had quashed this line of argument. The case chiefly relied on by the Government to overturn the Clark ruling was one from Ohio involving a referendum on a constitutional amendment. Said the Supreme Court: "The method of ratification is left to the choice of Congress. Both methods of ratification, by legislature or convention, call for action by deliberative assemblies of the people which it was assumed would voice the will of the people. . . . The determination of the method is the exercise of a national power . . . conferred upon Congress." For the 18th Amendment, the Congress in its wisdom specified ratification by legislatures. Three other obstacles to the Supreme Court's sustaining the Clark opinion: 1) No amendment has ever been declared unconstitutional; 2) All 19 amendments have been ratified by legislatures; 3) "Public policy" generally restrains the Supreme Court from invalidating a fundamental law after a long lapse of years. Pennsylvania's Wet Representative Beck, onetime Solicitor General, recalled, however, that "nearly 25 years after the enactment of the Missouri Compromise, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case finally concluded it was invalid." Judge Clark anticipated his critics with an analysis of all the other amendments in an effort to prove that the 18th constituted such a large and extraordinary a grant of power as to differentiate it from all others. But a Supreme Court opinion often cited last week to show the weight of custom in legislative ratification: "A long acquiescence in repeated acts ... is evidence that those matters have been generally considered by the people as properly within legislative control." Politics. The decision caused a Dry uproar. Judge Clark was accused of being "in rebellion against the constitution." The Anti-Saloon League said he was "threshing old straw." Dry Congressmen declared that he was trying to curry political favor--a declaration followed immediately by reports that New Jersey Republicans were already considering him as a candidate for governor. Judge Clark promptly declared he would "not consider" any political offers. Enforcement. Prohibition suffered no change as a result of the Clark decision. Other Federal judges in New Jersey, disagreeing with their colleague said they would not be bound by his views, continued convicting and sentencing Dry law violators. To his New Jersey subordinates Prohibition Director Woodcock wired: DON'T BE DISCOURAGED BY JUDGE CLARK'S DECISION. CARRY ON. Hoover's "Out." One of the wildest rumors generated by the ruling was that Judge Clark made his ruling with the knowledge and consent of the White House, to provide President Hoover with a neat, complete "out" from the Prohibition controversy. As "proof" of this fabulous theory, the theorists pointed to the speed with which Attorney General Mitchell sent the case to the Supreme Court. Henri Mouquin, 93, famed oldtime Manhattan wine merchant and restaurateur, was "electrified" by the decision, wired from his Virginia retreat to his sons to prepare to get back into business.

* Negro hero of a famed slavery case which helped precipitate the Civil War. Dred Scott lost his case when the Supreme Court ruled he was not a citizen but "property." * Not to be confused (by males) with D M C," manufactured by Dollfus-Mies & Cie. of France.

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