• Alice Roosevelt Longworth--Crowded Hours •

        Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and wife of Ohio Senator Nicholas Longworth, recounted in her autobiography Crowded Hours the change in sentiment for the Eighteenth Amendment among her family and Washington society.  Alice was among the other Washington wets who were making beer in the basement and gin in the bathtub.  As the years passed, drinking became more of a marked sign of wealth and status and Alice encountered people who were consumed with drinking–it was all they could talk about in social circles.  Alice was turned off from this behavior and moved toward a “Constitutional dry,” obeying the law because it was in the Constitution, not necessarily because she agreed with it.  This passage captures the many angles of the argument for both wets and drys.[1]

This page was last updated 14 December 2003