"Betrayed" Vineyardists

Shortly after Prohibition came, a sizable section of the U. S. wine-bibbing public learned that it could, apparently legally, fulfill the higher destiny of the grape at home. California vineyardists planted vast new acreage, grew rich, came to look upon Prohibition as a commercial blessing. Sadly disillusioned last week for the first time, the California Vineyardists' Association plumped for modification. Cause of the disillusionment was a Kansas City (Mo.) Federal Court's decision last autumn penalizing Ukiah Grape Products Co. for selling unfermented grape juice to householders with the understanding that it would subsequently develop into powered wine.

Charging the Government with "betraying" wine-grape growers into costly expansion by the Farm Board's loans to Fruit Industries Ltd.. last week in San Francisco Donald D. Conn, managing director for 9,000 vineyardists, hotly declared: "I personally called on the Assistant U. S. Attorney General [Mabel Walker Willebrandt] in May 1927, and had a four-hour conference with the officers of that department concerning the right to make concentrate and the method by which it should be marketed. . . . Again in December 1928, January and March 1929, I led a delegation of grape-growers to the offices of the Department of Justice to discuss the very thing. . . . There was no misunderstanding whatever, at any time. ... I laid the plan before Mr. Hoover in a personal conference while he was Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Hoover realized the plan bade fair to be the salvation of the grape industry and encouraged it personally. . . ."

In Washington the Departments of Justice and Agriculture promptly denied ever having been consulted about the organization of Fruit Industries Ltd. Just as promptly, Chairman James Clifton Stone of the Farm Board announced that his bureau "did not lend a penny to Fruit Industries Ltd. until it had been assured by the Department of Justice, the Treasury and the Prohibition Bureau that the grape concentrate business of that company was perfectly legal."

Coincident with the grape-growers' excitement, California was having its first Wet v. Dry political scrimmage in a Republican Senatorial primary race (to be voted Aug. 30), to win which is tantamount to election. Chief champion for the Prohibitionists is Senator Samuel Shortridge, 70. Other contesting Drys are Representative Joe Crail of Los Angeles, Representative Philip David Swing of El Centre and Robert Pierce ("Bob") Shuler, famed radio evangelist. A militant Wet candidate is Tallant Tubbs, rich, blue-blooded young San Franciscan whose family has the largest rope business west of the Mississippi and who has served in the State Senate since 1924, when he was 27. Last year he eloped to Reno with Mrs. Olivia Pillsbury Gibson, daughter of the president of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Year before that he conducted a lone-wolf campaign for the Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor on a dripping Wet platform; surprised himself and everybody else by losing by a scant 17,000 votes out of 889,505 cast. Quick to capitalize the grape-growers' trouble, said Tallant Tubbs last week: "I own no vineyards. The growers' statement that they have been betrayed is absolutely true. I think they have been unfairly treated by the Department of Justice. Their present plight is due to having been led to believe that they could continue to market concentrates, when Justice officials changed their attitude. I expect to have the support of vineyardists. . . ."

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