Background
Pauline Sabin was a wealthy, elegant, socially prominent, and politically well-connected New Yorker. She was the daughter of Paul Morton, Secretary of the Navy under President Theodore Roosevelt, and granddaughter of J. Sterling Morton, Secretary of Agriculture under President Grover Cleveland. She married J. Hopkinson Smith, Jr., in 1907. They divorced in 1914. In 1916 she married Charles H. Sabin, president of the Guaranty Trust Company and treasurer of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA).
Before 1929, she favored small government and free markets. She initially supported prohibition, as she later explained: "I felt I should approve of it because it would help my two sons. The word-pictures of the agitators carried me away. I thought a world without liquor would be a beautiful world." Sabin was very active in Republican politics. She was growing increasingly disenchanted with prohibition but worked on behalf of Herbert Hoover in the election of 1928 despite his uncertain stand on the issue. In his inauguration speech he vowed to enforce anti-liquor legislation. After the enactment of the Jones Act in May 1929 drastically increased penalties for the violation of prohibition, she resigned from the Republican National Committee and took up the cause of repealing prohibition.
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