Ladies at Roslyn

(See front cover)

A string of smart motors swished up the driveway to Mrs. Edward Small Moore's shingled, rambling country home in Roslyn, L. I. one sunny morning last week. Out of the shining automobiles stepped 70 ladies clad brightly, tastefully, expensively. Reckoned by money and prestige, they were the cream of the nation's womanhood, gathered from Maine to Oregon. Inside the Moore house they sat on Early American chairs and ate a chatty meal. Then the ladies repaired to a long drawing room full of roses and tulips. At this point the gathering lost all resemblance to a conventional Long Island luncheon. No bridge tables had been set up, no backgammon boards unfolded. The ladies were there for serious business. Leaders and representatives of a million other women, they had come to talk and act about liquor in the U. S.

Full credit for helping to bring about national Prohibition has been given to women like Schoolteacher Frances Elizabeth Willard and tough, evangelical little

Carry Nation, smashing bar mirrors to avenge her drunkard husband's death. Solidly and admiringly behind the Willard eloquence and the Nation hatchet stood the one effective feminine organization in the 19th Century U. S., the militant ladies of the tabernacle, the churchwomen. Times change. The ladies at Roslyn, last week, were of a different order. As a group they were more charming than churchy, handier with a mashie than with a hatchet, but most were mothers of families and all could raise respected if ineloquent voices in their communities. They claimed no divine guidance but they took seriously their membership in the National Executive Committee of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. They believed in Temperance but not in the 18th Amendment. Women had had no small part in putting that Amendment in the Constitution. These women were at Roslyn to help take it out. With hands which are usually busy knitting, Chairwoman Mrs. Henry Bourne Joy, a motherly soul who is president of the Needlework Guild of America and whose husband used to run Packard Motor Car Co. in Detroit, took up a pencil and rapped on a table for order. Her signal got the attention of a potent segment of the nation's womanpower. Down sat Virginia's Charlotte Noland, who controls fashionable Foxcroft School and her hunters with a practiced, efficient rein. With her was Mrs. George Sloane, a delegate to this year's Democratic Convention whose politics differ from those of her cousin David Ingalls, Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio. Georgia was represented by Mrs. William T. Healey of Atlanta, who operates her deceased husband's realty business. The wife of Anaconda Copper's President Cornelius Francis Kelley spoke for Montana. The wives of Pierre du Pont, who has his own Wet group, and William Corbit Spruance, du Pont vice president and director, spoke for Delaware. There were other able wives of able husbands: Hostess Moore who is married to a director of American Can and Lehigh Valley R. R.; intense little Mrs. Archibald B. Roosevelt; small, blonde Mrs. William Chapman Potter, whose husband is president of Guaranty Trust Co. For President ...? When the doors shut politely on the Press, prime business of the W. O. N. P. R. executives was brought on the carpeted floor: whom would the organization support for President? Certain Republican ladies reminded the group that it had been founded on a non-partisan basis. Democratic ladies recalled that the organization, prior to last month's conventions, had pledged support to the Wettest platform. But President Hoover had not yet confirmed his party's stand on Prohibition, the G. O. Partisans argued. It would not be good policy to base the final W. O. N. P. R. position on two platforms and one acceptance speech. The record was not complete. Nevertheless, the committeewomen had come to act, not temporize, and act they did. Fifty-one to 19 they adopted the following resolution: "While the President of the United States has no power to veto or change a proposed Constitutional amendment, he has through the prestige of his high office the power to wield directly or indirectly great influence over legislation.

"We therefore urge the members of this organization, because they are committed to the cause of Repeal, whether they be Republicans or whether they be Democrats, to give their support to the nominee of that party which favors the repeal of the 18th Amendment, Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

Of the 19 who dissented from handing the Democracy a million ballots, a majority was reported to have been "brought around" after the meeting. But Mrs. Robert W. Lovett, who rallied Massachusetts women to Hoover in 1928, did not vote for the resolution. Maude K. Wetmore, who did the same thing in Rhode Island, announced she would not support Roosevelt. Mrs. Agnes Jones Gifford, onetime Republican member of the New Jersey Legislature, was the first member to resign as a result of the swing to Roosevelt. Sixty-four rank & file Republicans, including Mmes August Belmont, George Fisher Baker and Kermit Roosevelt, served notice on their executive committee that they would not support the Democratic nominee because "each individual should vote for the man best qualified to lead the nation." Secretary of the Treasury Mills, adroit socialite, was supposed to have engineered their revolt.

On the other hand, Committeewoman Mrs. Graham Dougherty of Philadelphia, an active Republican worker in her city and State, announced: "You can say that no one of the Pennsylvania women here voted against . . . the resolution."

"I have been a Republican all my life," said motherly Mrs. Joy, "but I joined this organization believing that repeal of the 18th Amendment was necessary, and I still think it the most important issue before us." Another who sacrificed party to principle was the organization's chairman and founder, Pauline Morton Sabin.

"Not me, lady.' Last week was not the first time that Mrs. Sabin had made the sacrifice. Thirteen years ago she became sufficiently interested in politics to join the Suffolk County Republican Com mittee. Her husband, Board Chairman Charles Hamilton Sabin of Guaranty Trust Co., was a Democrat, but that did not hinder Mrs. Sabin's swift rise in G. O. P. circles. In 1920 she was selected for the New York State Executive Committee. A year later she was elected President of the Women's National Republican Club. She was a delegate to the Cleveland convention in 1924, served as a member of the Republican National Committee from 1924-28. She campaigned for President Hoover until two days after his inauguration. At that point Mrs. Sabin turned her back on her party affiliations.

It would not be accurate to say that Mrs. Sabin was immune to politics until 1919. Her family background is densely political. Her grandfather was Julius Sterling Morton, onetime Governor of Nebraska, Secretary of Agriculture in the Cleveland Cabinet, founder of Arbor Day. His ghost almost rose to smite her when she was making a speech recently in arid Omaha.

"A man in the crowd," Mrs. Sabin reports, "yelled at me, 'What would your grandfather, who was an advocate of temperance, say to your talk?' I only dimly remember my grandfather and I did not know his views on the subject and accordingly I hesitated for a minute. Suddenly another man in the crowd answered for me. 'I know what he would say,' he shouted, 'exactly what he did when some Prohibitionists called on him and asked him what to do about a saloon which was operating in the vicinity of the Capitol. He told them to move it into the basement of that building.' " When she was 16, Pauline Morton moved with her father, onetime vice president of Santa Fe R. R., whose brother is famed for his salt ("It Pours"), to Washington when he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Roosevelt. She had a Washington debut and when she married J. Hopkins Smith Jr. in Manhattan in 1907, the Nicholas Longworths were among the onlookers. That marriage resulted in two children and a dissolution in 1914. Two years later Mr. Sabin wooed & won Pauline Morton Smith. His friend and business associate William Chapman Potter, Guaranty Trust's President, had married her sister Caroline, now the wife of Harry Frank Guggenheim, U. S. Ambassador to Cuba. The precise moment at which Mrs. Sabin, who says she originally favored Prohibition for her two sons' sake, decided to found the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform occurred during a Congressional hearing in 1928 at which Mrs. Ella Boole, the crafty old head of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, spoke. "I represent," shouted Ella Boole, "the women of America!" "Well, lady," Mrs. Sabin recalls remarking to herself, "here's one woman you don't represent." As a nucleus for her organization, Mrs. Sabin called upon Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll, Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer, insurgent Miss Wetmore and Mrs. Moore. The W. O. N. P. R. was founded in May 1929 at Chicago. Program-- The W. O. N. P. R. program has followed that of the longtime Dry policy: trying to get men in Congress and the White House who will support the cause. This autumn the organization faces its first big test, for which the Roslyn meeting, last week, was a prelude. There are 435 Representatives, 33 Senators, one President and one Vice President to be campaigned for or against. It takes money to campaign, as Mrs. Sabin's Wet sisterhood well knows. National headquarters of W. O. N. P. R. seldom has more than a three-month supply of it on hand, but the group is happily supplied with rich husbands. If a Democratic Wet majority is returned to Congress and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House, and if the party keeps its platform pledge to submit the question of Repeal to Constitutional conventions within the States, and if three-quarters of the States cancel the 18th Amendment, then the last step of the W. O. N. P. R. program will be in order. The organization pledges itself to: 1) assist in framing temperate State liquor laws, 2) insist that national Prohibition remain effective until such laws are operative, 3) conduct a campaign of temperance education throughout the nation's schools, churches, welfare institutions. Mrs. Sabin insists that she has enlisted in the fight for Repeal and revision of the nation's liquor laws "for the rest of her life." Since she is not yet 46, there appears to be considerable work ahead of her. How sincere and dedicated her fol lowing is will be more accurately determined between now and November. The real strength of the Sabin organization lies in the desire of the smalltown matron to ally herself, no matter how remotely, with a congregation of bona fide, rotogravure society figures in a cause about which she may or may not have profound convictions. The weakness of the W. O. N. P. R. lies in the populous class of rural women who also vote and who bitterly suspect, envy and hate the ground that ladies like Mrs. Sabin walk on. Crusaders. A companion organization to Mrs. Sabin's is the Crusaders, which numbers a million militant male members (chiefly young) and which was founded in the same month and year. Last week. two days after the Roslyn convention, the Crusaders, 40 trustees and commanders met privately in the country home of Trustee Leonard Hanna at Mentor, Ohio, near Cleveland where the organization was formed. Plotting their part in the coming elections, the Crusader board, of which Mrs. Sabin's stepson Charles Jr. is a member, took a more cautious course than their feminine contemporaries. In a statement which leaned toward but did not embrace the candidacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Crusaders declared: "Our position is now, as always, to support only those candidates for office, regardless of party affiliations, who favor the principles for which we stand. . . . The Democratic party has met the issue squarely and we commend them for their stand. The Republican party has offered a plank which is, as yet, undefined. We call upon the President, as the nominee of his party, to state clearly and plainly where he stands on this all-important question--whether for or against the repeal of the 18th Amendment." Elsewhere on the Wet front, the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (600,000 members), oldest Wet unit, which has the support of Pierre du Pont, was biding its time, waiting for the Hoover acceptance speech before plumping for either or neither party. Book. More thoughtfully statistical than the Sabin sisterhood, the Crusaders are currently circulating a book called The New Crusade, presented "to the thinking peoples of the United States that they may intelligently understand the results of compulsory Prohibition." At the University of Chicago last month Cleveland Oilman Fred G. Clark, 38, the Crusaders' founder and commander-in-chief, debated Prohibition with General Secretary Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals. During this debate the greatest Wet surprise of the year was sprung. It was evident that Commander Clark's purpose was to meet the Dry forces well over the halfway mark; to get them, if he could, to unite in a movement which would put Temperance above the 18th Amendment. The only barrier existing between the Crusaders and the Drys that he could see was the fact of the existing Prohibition laws. Much interested, Secretary Wilson so plainly expressed his approval of the Crusaders' "fair and constructive stand" on Temperance that next day Chicago newspapers drew the exaggerated conclusion that the Dry leader had become "moist." An echo of the Chicago debate, which marked a new and startlingly conciliatory phase in the hitherto acrimonious Wet v. Dry conflict, is to be found in Commander Clark's preface to the Crusader book: "There are three sides to the Liquor Problem. The Dry Side, the Wet Side and the Right Side! . . . The new Crusader ... is going to make every possible effort to get the old temperance forces to cooperate with him in his present challenge to the speakeasy, the bootlegger, the corrupt politician and the gangster! He believes that when sincere temperance people understand his motives they will back his Crusade, since the principles he stands for are practically the same code of the principles the W. C. T. U. adopted when present-day grey-haired mothers were children in short dresses." Focus. Last week Wet & Dry eyes turned to Congress, ultimate focus of their next big fight. There they beheld frothy turmoil over legalizing beer, heard noisy clamor for immediate Repeal. Beneath surface politics, however, was the solid fact that no serious move to effect a Change would or could be undertaken until after the People speak Nov. 8.

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