The greater part of a decade has elapsed since prohibition became national and the word Volstead was minted for household use. Yet last week while Andrew J. Volstead, three years since retired from Congress, was quietly busy in St. Paul investigating the validity of manufacturing permits for the use of industrial alcohol, a wave of anti-prohibition sentiment rose. How large the wave may have been, how much genuine and how much propaganda-made, there is no saying. But it made a big splash.
There were the newspaper polls, conducted by more than 400 newspapers in nearly every state. Unfortunately there were three polls, and there is no means of estimating how much they overlapped.
The largest, conducted by 375 members of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, (and by the New York World) polled some 1,700,000 votes. The voter was given three choices, prohibition as it is, light wines and beers, or repeal of prohibition. Forty-seven states (all except North Dakota) engaged in the poll. In only two states, Kansas and South Carolina, was there a majority for prohibition. Only six others gave pluralities to prohibition. And the total vote was about five to one against prohibition.