"Act of God"

Many a citizen who read his newspaper last Sunday morning was reminded of a charred keg down in his cellar, which he had filled weeks ago with nothing more intoxicating than grape juice, cane sugar, pure water. He was reminded also that he had done nothing since about the mixture, but that soon it would be fermented, turned to glow-giving wine.

What recalled the cellar-kegs of the country was the news that Franklin Chase Hoyt, a Manhattan jurist, had won Publisher William Randolph Hearst's prize of $25,000 for a plan to modify Prohibition. The essence of Winner Hoyt's plan was to leave the 18th Amendment alone and simply to rephrase the Volstead Act so that it would prohibit distilled alcoholic liquors--created by acts of man--and permit beverages rendered alcoholic by fermentation, which, explained the Hoyt Plan, was an "act of God."

One learned woman and six learned men* had chosen this Plan from 58 submitted to them by Publisher Hearst's contest editors. The 58 had been weeded from a field of 71,248 plans ranging from a jokester's one word, "Water," to a verbosifier's screed of 50,000 words.

Mr. Hearst's editors took care to point out that the Hearst modification contest had attracted more than three times the number of entries which were submitted last autumn in William Crapo Durant's enforcement contest for the same size prize.

Not all who read the prize-winning plan were optimistic of its practicability. A chief skeptic cited his chief objection. Congressman James Montgomery Beck of Philadelphia, who was chosen for the Hearst Award jury for his knowledge of Constitutional law, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he said:

"I am not wholly in accord with my colleagues. Plan No. 21,182 [the Hoyt Plan] is ingenious, but I fear impracticable, in view of the interpretation put upon the 18th Amendment by the Supreme Court of the U. S., which interpretation clearly includes wines and malt liquors in the phrase 'intoxicating liquors.'" Winner Hoyt had anticipated such criticism. Like any reformer--or ironist--he had written in his plan, referring to the Supreme Court, that he was sure that body would not "take it upon itself to nullify the will of the representatives of the People."

*The Jury Members were: California's Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn, Missouri's onetime (1911-29) Senator James A Reed; Rt Rev. Monsignor John L. Belford of Brooklyn; Rear Admiral Gary Travers Grayson, onetime (1913-21) White House physician; Rabbi Nathan Krass of Manhattan; Archdeacon Joseph Henry Dodshoti of Ohio, Episcopal clergyman; Pennsylvania's Congressman James Montgomery Beck.