Pauline Sabine was an ardent prohibitionist, a glamorous
New York city member of the elite and wealthy class of the
1920's. Her father had served as Secretary of the Navy under
Teddy Roosevelt, her grandfather had been the Governor of
Nebraska and Secretary of Agriculture under Cleveland. Her
husband Charles Sabine was a successful Wall Street financier.
Pauline by 1929 was a Republican national committeewoman
who in April of that year at a "Women's National Republican
Club"
luncheon both announced her resignation from that post and
that she would from then on work to end prohibition.
Her words were widely reported and the overwhelming
support she received from women throughout the country
induced her to form and head the Women's Organization
for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). Officially beginning
in May 1929 in Chicago, the organization started with
a burst of favorable publicity due to the novelty of a
women's group working for repeal but also because Mrs.
Sabine attracted to her cause large numbers of women of
social and financial importance.
The WONPR objected to what they saw in prohibition as
federal interference into the traditional role of the
individual states in
controlling alcohol. Over the course of US history women
had normally taken the side of prohibition of liquor but
after "the great experiment" as many as two
million changed their views and joined with Sabine to
reverse what they saw as a program that failed to meet
the claims of their past. The eighteenth amendment had
promised that the US would be a better place for youth
by removing the temptation of alcohol and thereby "strengthening
character." The day to day experience of prohibition
created the opposite effect and in fact increased lawlessness,
encouraged crime and remained virtually unenforceable
over the scope of the US population.
Prohibitions failures were identified and defeated by
a large number of disparate groups but it was the women
of the US, under the leadership of dynamic intelligent
women like Pauline Sabine, that defined the ineffectiveness
of the prohibition policy as doing the real damage to
the countries moral compass and that repeal and a respect
for temperance and local control was the ultimate solution
to a sad and violent period of US history.
Mary
Lynn Mathre RN, has lived and worked in the tradition
of Pauline Sabine and is the first recipient of this distinction
identifying her as a leader of nurses and women in the
modern day effort to again rid the US of a failed prohibition
agenda.
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