INTOXICATING LIQUORS -- FEDERAL REGULATION
CONGRESS, prior to constitutional prohibition, pursued a negative rather than a positive policy in the regulation of intoxicating liquors. Not until the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment did Congress attempt to establish prohibition throughout the United States. Prior to that time whatever federal measures were enacted with reference to the liquor traffic were intended to create conditions under which the states could more freely exercise their police powers in regulating this traffic. Legislation on the subject of intoxicating liquor, therefore, was different from that pertaining to pure food and drugs, lotteries, child labor, and vice where there was a positive prohibition from using the agencies of interstate commerce for the furtherance of certain disapproved practices. Congress positively registered its disapproval on these questions. Regardless of what the individual states desired, Congress sought to discourage these practices and to prohibit them if it could do so constitutionally under its power to regulate interstate commerce. This was not the attitude towards regulating the liquor traffic. On the question of liquor, until quite recently, the attitude was one of neutrality. It was assumed that this was a problem for the respective states, and such measures as the Wilson Act and the Webb- Kenyon Act were intended to withdraw federal regulation in order that the states might be unhampered in
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