The bill to disclose how much cocaine, alcohol and opium were in medicines seemed like a shoo-in. Who could possibly object?

But in 1905, a majority of Maine House members voting on the measure did just that and the bill was defeated.

As Maine legislators now struggle with the issues of our day, it’s intriguing to take a look at how their counterparts of just a hundred years ago were coming to grips with the challenges of their own. Some have a familiar ring, while others seem a bizarre and distant.

Then, as now, lawmakers were debating medicines and other pharmaceutical products. In 1905, however, the focus of interest was not price but content. It was 27-year-old freshman Carl Milliken – just a few years later he would become the first Maine governor to occupy the Blaine House – who advocated for a bill to require patent medicine labels disclose the percentage of cocaine, alcohol and opium. The strangest aspect of the debate was that there seemed to be no effort to ban medicines from containing such intoxicants. Instead, the issue was joined over whether mere disclosure should be mandated.

Milliken, who brought his recent expertise as a Bates College science teacher to bear on the issue, referred not only to the risk of drug and alcohol addiction but also warned of the danger to children whose unwitting parents might dispense the merchandise to them.

But to 1905 legislators, these arguments fell to those of a future Maine U.S. senator, Democratic floor leader Charles Johnson, a former Waterville mayor. Johnson carried the day for the same reason making modern-day regulation of pharmaceuticals at the state level is difficult, namely, the interstate traffic in the products. Because, Johnson argued, Maine would be the only state imposing a labeling requirement, the out-of-state manufacturers – who even then furnished some 95 percent of the drugs sold in Maine – might refuse to supply the state with medicines rather than comply with the proposed law.

It was still a close 59-44 vote against the bill. The position espoused by Johnson prevailed, even though he was the Democratic leader in a body heavily dominated by Republicans like Milliken.

More in keeping with the stringent, moral reputation of the era, the 1905 Legislature rejected a bill to add insanity to the grounds for divorce. Such a measure would not win enactment in Maine until 1977.

The fervor that legislators today reserve for such emotionally charged issues as gun control and abortion was in those days vented on enforcement of prohibition – something that Maine like a lot of other states had enacted at the state level decades before it had become a federal law. The steps the GOP-controlled state government that year took to further tighten the noose around the neck of liquor bottles would undermine Republican influence in the state, leading by 1910 to the election of both a Democratic governor and Legislature.

In 1905, there was much less hand-wringing about the budget than legislators witness today despite – or perhaps because – the primary source of state government revenue was the property tax, then in the more agrarian culture of the Pine Tree state considered a more accurate measure of wealth than it is now.

State government delivered pleasant news at that time with a reduction from 2-3/4ths to 2-l/2 mills in its property tax rate. Total spending for the 1905-06 biennium being just more than $5 million. The biggest change wrought by passage of a hundred years is that we now have only to substitute a “b” for the “m” in the spelled out dollar amount.

Then, as now, spending on health care was at the top of the list, with grants to various hospitals throughout the state in the two-year period exceeding $250,000. The $l75,000 allocated for “soldiers’ pensions” is a reminder that the federal government had yet to assume as much responsibility for military appropriations in the twilight years of our state’s Civil War veterans.

A resolution passed to protest Congress’s passage of a law allowing duty free importation of lumber from New Brunswick and a House bill giving a tax break to small wood lot owners so as to foster timber conservation are ones that might well cross the desk of today’s state representatives.

The enthusiasm afforded baseball and football was evident from the response this Legislature gave to a petition from 25 Bangor citizens who urged it to prohibit baseball and football games near dwellings. The popularity of the sports triumphed over the perceived vulnerability of the newly expanded windows of Victorian homes. The legislature refused to enact the proposal.

One of the earliest items of business in each branch of the Legislature that year was a resolution to procure the services of typewriters. Though the 1905 session was not the first to make use of such a convenience, the measure is a reminder of how then, as now, solons merged their endeavors with the technology of their own era. It’s safe to say that coming some 22 years after Mark Twain submitted his “Life on the Mississippi” as the first work to be offered a publisher in typewritten form, the Legislature of 1905 stood in a similar relation to the typewriter as that of today does to the personal computer.

Moreover, our laptop’s alphabet, beginning with “QWERTY” has the same keyboard arrangement as on its typewriting ancestor.

Were they to drop by for a visit today, our legislators of a century ago would, in some ways, feel right at home. After all, many, including this author’s grandfather – then the state’s youngest state senator – were both accomplished football players as well as fluent typists.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].