The Grape Industry in California
By Will D. Gould
Attorney at Law, Los Angeles, California REMEMBERING that God has established all economic laws on a moral base, we may divine the reason for the awakening that is giving voice to the humble, that is strengthening the weak, that is arousing the people in all civilized nations, and that is organizing for victory, local, state, national, and world-wide, in the conflict with alcohol. The long delayed popular uprising has come. The tide of public opinion is rising with such force and power that no human hand can stay it. God's hour has struck, and the liquor traffic is doomed. Thus far the issue in California has centered upon the wine business, and speeches have been made and literature has been circulated, falsely declaring that the wine business is the "largest farming industry in California," that its destruction "means bankruptcy and ruin to many thousands of people," that "the people have invested their life earnings in the grape industry upon the invitation of both state and nation," that the wine industry "has been conducted on clean, high ground, free from abuses, promotive of general temperance, and a business in which any good man or woman might worthily engage," and that "this industry has brought only credit and glory to the state of California." We answer back: The wine industry is not a very large farming industry, and the belief is general that more intoxicating counterfeit wine has been made in the cellars of our great cities than in all the vineyards of America. At the best, we make no better wine than Noah made, and we make no better use of it. We submit that every family who has been long engaged in the "wine industry" in California has lost one or more members who have tarried too long at their own wine cup, who have drunk of the wine which "moveth itself aright," and which at last "biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." We submit that intoxicating wine is made to drink, and that no one can drink it without harm. It shortens life and kills continually. And wo to him by whom the offense comes, who puts the bottle to his neighbor's lips, and makes him drunken also. The grape industry is quite another matter. The grape food industry has no enemies, and it may be classed as one of our great farming industries. It is not a mocker or destroyer, and it will be promoted by the adoption of the proposed amendment—by making California "dry" this year. The world wants food; and the cultivation and production of the table grapes—raisins, grape sirup, grape cakes, and unfermented grape juice, the pure wine, the fruit of the vine that God makes, and that always blesses and always cheers, but never inebriates—offers to California—and destiny points the way—greater industry, greater profits, and greater blessings than all the wine industry in all the world in all the ages. I have lived in Los Angeles more than forty-two years, and have carefully studied economic and political questions; and I submit that the so-called "wine industry" has neither moral base nor economic value. It has tarnished the fair name of many people, and destroyed entire families in California, and is a constant blight upon our entire economic and political system. The Greater Profits on Table Grapes
I have planted and own in this county a forty-acre vineyard of table grapes, and I sold my grapes last year for thirty-two dollars a ton on the vines, while my neighbors sold their wine grapes at ten dollars a ton delivered at the winery. My grapes went to feed the hungry. The wine grapes went to mock and curse and kill my fellows. By and by we will have state aid in telling the truth about this matter, and thereby increase the grape industry. By and by we will turn the wineries and the breweries into bottling works to furnish pure wine, the unfermented grape juice, the blood of the grape—not a blood irritant, but blood food for both well and sick, young and old—and thus furnish an ever-increasing market for a most wholesome food, which we now obtain in small quantities at great expense. Put It Out or Double Our Jails and Asylums
Our jails and penal institutions, our hospitals and insane asylums, are overflowing, and we must immediately double their capacity and increase our taxes if the liquor traffic remains. But if we put away the liquor traffic, and make California "dry" this year, we will not have to build another jail or prison or insane asylum or hospital in this state for fifty years. Outraged public opinion has broken the bonds of partizanism, and this question now demands a non-partizan verdict at the ballot-box. Men and women have no right to view with pride the wine industry in California, or elsewhere, when they remember the army of the fallen—the army of the down-and-out—the unmarked graves, the result of a traffic more deadly than famine, pestilence, and war combined—when they remember its brood of evils, the saloons, the tobacco shops, the opium dens, and the houses of infamy. Why should we want to make San Francisco and our other great cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, inviting upon them the wrath of God and man? Why not clean up the whole Pacific coast this year, and invite the best men and women of all the world to come among us, to build homes, and to occupy the mighty land between the mountains and the sea, and make the Pacific coast the defender of national life, the land of liberty, the land of freedom, the land of plenty, and the land of sobriety and decency?