Dry Wave

With Mr. Hoover in the White House, eminent Drys felt last week that a real groundswell of Dryness was at last in motion. Said F. Scott McBride, general superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League: "This is the greatest opportunity that Prohibition has ever had." In commemoration of the event, the U.S. Drys, Consolidated--representatives of 31 Dry organizations--massed at the White House and presented Mr. Hoover with an embossed, vellum-bound volume containing their felicitations on his good fortune, signed by their organizations and all prominent Prohibitors. As a further vote of confidence the Anti-Saloon League announced its readiness to back Mr. Hoover's desire to shift the Prohibition unit from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice. This was notable because the late, astute Wayne B. Wheeler, predecessor of F. Scott McBride, for years fought the transfer. The date of the change is as yet problematical. It will probably not take place until after the regular session of Congress beginning next December is under way-- for Congress must authorize and Congress will probably have too many other things to do in the extra session. Meantime the Commission which Mr. Hoover appoints to investigate the Prohibition problem may have rendered a report. There will be opposition to the transfer, however. Already last week Dr. Harrison Estell Howe of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers was protesting that the transfer would be a "menace to legitimate industry" if it put the control of industrial alcohol permits into the hands of officials whose primary business is to catch and convict criminals. P: The potency of Mr. Hoover's Dry leadership was shown by the wife of the Wet Governor of New York, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would never jeopardize her husband's political position but who did, last week, go so far as to say to a Y. W. C. A. meeting in Manhattan: "A woman of my acquaintance remarked that while she never had lived up to the Prohibition law, she almost believed Mr. Hoover could get her to do it." P: In Peoria, Ill., on the first two days of Mr. Hoover's administration, 20 persons, including two women, died from drinking poison gin. In White Plains, N. Y., on the same day, a jury awarded $7,500 damages to a Mrs. Owen Gray. The defendants, Philip Dominic and Hilda Nardecchia, alleged speakeasy owners, declared that Owen Gray had brought liquor to their restaurant, become intoxicated, tried to butt two other patrons and, missing them, butted the wall with injury to his spinal column. Mrs. Gray, suing for damages to her husband's physique, declared that her husband bought seven drinks from Defendant Nardecchia, after which he sat down at a piano and sang "The Sidewalks of New York," "An Irish Jaunting Car" and "Sweet Adeline." At the end of the third song he was, she said, set upon jointly by an Englishman and an Irishman, both angry, from which resulted his injuries. A provision of the Volstead Act makes liquor sellers responsible for such misadventures. P: One event was perhaps a shock to Mr. Hoover. The omniscient press recalled that Secretary of Commerce Robert Patterson Lamont was listed along with John J. Raskob, Charles H. Sabin, Pierre S. du Pont, the late Haley Fiske, Samuel Harden Church. Nicholas Brady, as one of the directors of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Hastily the press consulted the Association, but the Association did not know that Mr. Lamont had left its ranks. Mr. Lamont, asked by the press, said that he had resigned "sometime within the last six months." Later he said that a friend had once asked him to join the Association and through that friend he had forwarded his resignation. "We all do some things for friendship," he explained. Mr. Lamont's friends in Chicago were amused. Said Dr. Clarence True Wilson, secretary of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals: "We Methodists believe in repentance." Said F. Scott McBride: "We always welcome converts." P: In Philadelphia detectives arrested two Negro youths for wearing corsets within which were fastened hot water bottles containing whiskey. The charge was illegal transportation. P: One of Mr. Lament's former A. A. P. A. associates was Banker Charles H. Sabin of Manhattan. Mrs. Charles H. Sabin,-- Republican National Committeewoman from New York, campaigned last fall for Mr. Hoover, saying that she believed his election would be the most practical way of securing Modification. What she thinks* of the President's becoming the rallying point of the Drys is not known but last week she resigned as Committeewoman, saying only that she had served ten years and that was enough. P: Balancing the discovery of Secretary of Commerce Lament's connection with the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, it was disclosed that Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde was an honorary member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. P: An appropriation of $50,000 made by the last Congress for "prohibition educational" purposes is to be spent on posters, leaflets and cartoons to persuade the public in favor of law enforcement. Dry organizations were invited to help choose the poster designs. P: The first few days of operation of the Jones Act ($10,000-fine-and-five-years-in-jail law) brought out the following observations : That although it makes manufacture, transportation and sale, however trivial, a felony, it imposes no new penalty for illegal possession of liquor, an omission which may be welcome to many. That the new law is in the nature of "protection" for U. S. citizen-bootleggers; for, since offense is a felony, aliens found guilty can be at once deported, restricting the field largely to native or naturalized businessmen. First reports on the operation of the Jones Act detailed that: 1) In Philadelphia a judge sentenced Paul Groggo, 15, to five years' imprisonment and $10,000 fine; later the judge suspended the sentence. 2) In Boston, orders were issued to double the bail required in all liquor cases before Federal Commissioners. 3) Trucking firms who have been transporting liquor to foreign embassies in Washington were told to cease; only actual diplomats in actual diplomatic automobiles may transport liquor. 4) Seven men arrested in Manhattan on March 4 waited last week to find out the hour and minute of Calvin Coolidge's signing the Jones Act--hoping it was signed at least one minute after their arrests--but Attorney-General Mitchell announced that anyone caught that day would be tried under the Jones Act. 5) The bootleggers of Washington, D.C., frightened or greedy, increased the price of alcohol from $11 to $20 a gallon, gin from $2 to $5 a bottle, rye whiskey from $3 to $6 a pint. 6) Bootleggers in Manhattan complained that the price they have to pay for protection has been doubled.

*Daughter of Paul Morton. Secretary of the Navy under Roosevelt, granddaughter of J. Sterling Morton, Secretary of the Interior under Cleveland.