The Liquor Dealer's Association

About This Item

Title: The Liquor Dealer's Association
Date: 25 May 1857
Creator(s): Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: per.01458
Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 25 May 1857: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
Contributors to digital file: Samantha Gilmore Kevin McMullen Karie Cobb
Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The Liquor Dealer's Association." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
Source File: per.01458.xml (TEI)

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THE LIQUOR DEALER'S ASSOCIATION.

The liquor dealers of Kings County meet this afternoon at Mooney's, corner York and Pearl streets. We should really like to know what grounds these gentlemen rely upon to get the license law declared unconstitutional.¹ They do not propose to debar their members from obtaining licenses, and hence, as may have been seen from the lists we have published of applicants for licenses, every liquor dealer who is respectable and influential enough to get a license will obtain one. Those who can afford to pay the $30, and who are reputable enough to prove themselves of good character, and to procure the signers to their petition, 'c., comprise the elite of the Kings County Association. These will obtain licenses; and then the Association will not protect them in the violation of the conditions comprised in it. Consequently they will have no further interest in remaining in the Association.

Here is the difference between the Prohibitory Law and the new License law. The former, warring against all liquor dealers indiscriminately, drove the first-class hotel keeper and the tenant of the lowest groggery alike into a union for the purpose of resisting its encroachments upon them both. But the License law draws a dividing line between the reputable liquor dealers and the disreputable, and allies itself with the interests of the former, against the latter. We have reason to know that even the Counsel of the Association themselves are without hope of successfully contesting the law. The best advice they can give their clients is, get licenses, if you can. And we may depend on it that all who can get licenses will do so; and that none who get them, will be willing to join in a crusade against the law. The Liquor Dealers' Association, thus deprived of its best members, must collapse. Its mission was to fight the Prohibitory Law; and it accomplished that mission well. But it has no call to peril its laurels in a vain attempt to overthrow the present law. Backed by public opinion, as in its opposition to the Prohibitory Law, the Association was powerful; but with its best members holding licenses, and therefore interested, with the public at large, in enforcing the new law, any opposition to it on the part of the Association can only result in a mortifying failure.

Notes:

1. An excise law, or license law, was passed by the New York State Legislature on April 16, 1857, that served to further regulate liquor licenses and limit both the sale of and access to alcohol. [back]