Monday, Aug. 27, 1928
Bratt Resigns
"The fight against human excesses . . . is difficult. The fight against profiteering purveyors of alcohol is difficult. The fight against these two Powers combined is HOPELESS." --Ivan Bratt.
The amount of liquor toped and swizzled in Sweden has been approximately halved during the past 15 years. Arrests for drunkenness have been halved. Crimes of violence have been reduced almost two-thirds. Swedes give the credit to Dr. Ivan Bratt. Yet he has just resigned as President of the Swedish Liquor & Wine Trust: a unique corporation, doing business with the strange object of making as few sales as possible yet always paying to contented shareholders 7%.
Parents used to take sick children to Dr. Ivan Bratt, a young and smart child specialist, in 1909. Some still do. However 1909 is pertinent because it was then that Swedish temperance societies polled 1,800,000 votes for absolute prohibition and only 20,000 for modified prohibition. That straw vote scared florid liquor barons white--and gave young Dr. Bratt a keen business idea.
His scheme was to form a money pool of shrewd, rich friends and buy out the scared liquor interests of Sweden for a song. The doctor's wife, a Baroness in her own right, and other influential connections at Court and among politicians, facilitated Schemer Bratt by contriving to postpone the enactment of national prohibition, while his pool bought out the liquor barons cheap.
Within five years, and at a total cost of only 20,000,000 kroner ($5,400,000), the entire liquor business of Sweden had been acquired and monopolized under the Bratt System.
Though the Liquor & Wine Trust (Vins och Spritcentralen) stands rock founded upon 7%, its other principles are more interesting. The return to shareholders can never be more than 7%. The surplus profits, amounting to 46% of sales last year, are turned over to the National Treasury, and usually constitute of the revenue of Sweden. Yet even these principles are not the most interesting.
The so-called Bratt System of liquor purveying is not "rationing," as is often erroneously supposed. It does not extend to each Swede the privilege of buying a ration equal to his neighbor's. A citizen upon whose police record appear charges of repeated drunkenness, crime, wife beating, or failure to support his children, cannot buy liquor at all in the neat stores of the Swedish Monopoly.
To each customer a registered motbok (passbook). Whenever and whatever he or she buys is recorded. A catalog of 800 wines and 250 liquors lists prime Scotch whiskey at $2.50, sound French champagne at $2.75 and fiery Swedish brandy at 75-c-.
But not more than 13 gallons of hard liquor may be bought in any one year by even the most virtuous citizen. Less than 40% of the passbook holders ask for enough to fill their quotas. Single, self-supporting women were sternly held down by Dr. Bratt to an average of a gallon a year. Bachelors must attain the age of 23 before becoming eligible for a passbook.
Restrictions on the passbook sales of wines resemble those on liquor, but are lenient in proportion to the "lightness" of the wine.
Since Dr. Bratt holds that food counteracts the effects of alcohol, Swedish restaurants may dispense liquor with meals after 12 noon, but not more than 2 1/2 ounces to a patron before 3 p.m. Afterwards, it becomes possible by ordering an indefinite succession of meals, to tope an indefinite amount.
Each restaurant has its liquor quota. When this has been exceeded liquor may still be sold, but the proprietor is then legally compelled to dispense it at the price which he paid to the Monopoly Stores. Thus exceeding one's quota means not profit but loss, and Swedish restaurant proprietors are canny.
To some the achievement of Smart Ivan Bratt will seem inadequate; and it was with their view well in mind that he resigned as Sweden's "Liquor Tsar" last week. A Parliamentary report on the workings of the Bratt System is being prepared, prior to a national liquor plebiscite, and Dr. Bratt wants to be free to assist and testify before the investigators.
Not on a thousand pages could one print the speeches and tracts which Dr. Bratt has poured forth during the past decade and a half, striving always to keep Sweden in the middle road of individual liquor control. The last straw vote of Swedish prohibition societies (in 1922) showed that the 1,800,000 Swedes who wanted total prohibition in 1909 have dwindled to 889,000; while the cohorts of Brattism have swelled from 20.000 to 924,000. Thus the fight is just beginning to be won.
Ivan Bratt will escape being "out of a job" during the liquor investigation by becoming Director of the Paris Office of the great Swedish ball bearing firm called S. K. F. (which controls the French ball bearing industry). Thus Dr. Bratt will receive the large salary which he frankly admits that he now needs, to put his children through college. A realist to the last, he will earn with S. K. F. what he has refused to earn from the Bratt Monopoly. Indeed he drew up the monopoly articles of incorporation with such cunning that nobody can profiteer in selling liquor to Swedes.
Some people still think that to have halved the liquor consumption of Sweden, while at the same time making bootleggery unprofitable, is not enough. That view is not shared by His Majesty Gustav V, 70-year-old tennis-playing King of Sweden, who, from the first, has encouraged, befriended and warmly praised Ivan Bratt.
Essence of Brattism: "Impose reasonable conditions and enforce them . . . firmly. . . . The control of liquor must be human, not superhuman; firm, not rigid; slow, not fast; democratic in aims, but individualistic in application.