Autobiography of Charles Clinton Nourse: Prepared for use of Members of the FamilyNourse, Charles Clinton
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Autobiography of Charles Clinton Nourse: Prepared for use of Members of the Family
Nourse, Charles Clinton
Iowa -- Politics and government; Lawyers -- Iowa -- Biography; Nourse, Charles Clinton, 1829-
As a member of the committee appointed to prepare a bill for the
action of the general assembly of 1884, I can say that there was at
no time any thought by the majority of that committee of asking any
legislation that would prohibit the manufacture of intoxicating
liquors for medicinal and mechanical purposes or for export and
sale beyond the jurisdiction of our laws. That committee was
composed of lawyers who fully understood that any legislation that
we could obtain must be based upon the police power of the state to
regulate the sale of intoxicating liquors within its jurisdiction.
The Utopian idea that the legislature of Iowa could control the use
to which intoxicating liquors, manufactured and sold as an article
of commerce in the markets of the world, might be applied in
another state, I do not think was at all entertained by the members
of that committee, save perhaps one of them, Mr. Todhunter. The
bill that was prepared by the committee and presented to the
legislature was not enacted into a law in the form in which we
originally presented it; but house file No. 516-1/2 was reported by
the committee as a substitute for that and other bills that had
been introduced on the subject and was passed in both the house and
the senate in the form in which it came from the committee, and
constitutes chapter 143 of the acts of the twentieth general
assembly. And it is this law upon which Judge Conrad bases his
opinion. That the friends of this law never intended or believed
that it would prohibit the manufacture of alcohol in this state for
export clearly appears from the record. Pending the vote upon the
passage of this bill in the house the friends of the bill indulged
in very little speech-making, and Governor Carpenter and Mr. Kerr
were the only members who undertook to reply to the assaults of its
opponents. The first effort of the opponents of the bill was to try
and load it down with amendments and thereby secure its defeat. An
amendment was offered by Mr. Bolter, of Harrison, making the bill
an absolute prohibition of the manufacture of intoxicating liquors
in this state, and this amendment came within one vote of being
adopted. The vote stood fifty votes against the amendment and
forty-nine for it. The entire fifty members that voted _against_
this amendment of Mr. Bolter, voted _for_ the passage of the bill
the next day, while of the forty-nine that voted for Mr. Bolter's
amendment nearly all of them voted against the passage of the bill.
The _Iowa State Register_ the morning after this vote was taken
contained the following leading editorial giving an account of this
attempt to kill the bill. I quote from the _State Register_ of
February 29, 1884, as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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