Speech for Two

There was a hush in the upper chamber as Senator William Cabell Bruce, Democrat, of Maryland, rose to speak. Only Vice President Dawes and Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, who was author and co-author of such controversial measures as the 18th Amendment and the Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act, were present to listen to him. His words, however, were not hushed;* they were put into the Congressional Record and spread about by the press of the land; and that is what Senator Bruce wanted.

He, a Presbyterian, and a Wet, said: "If there is any Vatican prejudicing the freedom of our political life it is not the ancient Vatican at Rome, but the browbeating Vatican which the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church has erected just across from the United States Senate Office Building.... As a Democrat I am not only disgusted with Prohibition, but I have, I confess, grown restive under the long exclusion of the Democratic party from power."

Senator Sheppard listened patiently, taking notes; then snorted his arrogant reply: "The Wets have about as much chance of weakening the Prohibition law as a humming bird has of flying from, this planet to Mars with the Washington monument on its back."

*The words of Senator Bruce are rarely hushed. Last spring, Senator Neely of West Virginia told him to his face that he talked too much. "I believe that I do not exaggerate," said Mr. Neely, "when I say that we have heard the Senator from Maryland speak 75 times on this bill [the Watson-Parker railroad bill]. We have learned to know in advance just what he is going to say.... We have voted down everything the Senator from Maryland has proposed and defeated everything he has supported, by a majority of 3 to 1.... But some debaters are insuppressible. It is as useless and hopeless to talk against their persistent, painful and pestiferous argumentation as it is to try to cure the hay-fever...."