Try, Try Again

In a dreary Congressional committee room last week, leading U.S. drys took turns telling a House Judiciary subcommittee why the U.S. needs a new national prohibition law--at least for the duration.

The Anti-Saloon League's George W. Crabbe argued that the liquor business is a "nonessential, luxury enterprise."

Sleepy, little W. D. Jones of Van Wert, Ohio drifted through the room passing out printed tracts (Use Your Bible to Battle the Bottle; 1944 Two Resolutions--Will Keep Sweet and I Will Not Drink Alcohol).

Mrs. Ida B. Wise Smith, 72 and perky, national president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, testified that her organization represents "organized mother love" battling against the entrenched liquor czars. Further, said she, housewives are short of sugar because too much is being diverted to the breweries.

"We are having far too many plane crashes in which drink is a factor," observed D. Leigh Colvin,* the Prohibition Party's 1936 presidential candidate, who is convinced (in spite of contradictory WMC figures) that seven out of ten cases of war-plant absenteeism are caused by "bouts with the rum pot."

Two Techniques. Polite but cool, Committeemen fidgeted for a day, then prepared to pigeonhole the wartime prohibition bill introduced by South Carolina's bony, pious Joseph R. Bryson. But they could not lay away the still vigorous prohibition movement quite so easily.

One group of resourceful drys (led by the W.C.T.U.) has continually and noisily nagged Congress for immediate nationwide prohibition. But another group, shrewdly piloted by the politically seasoned Anti-Saloon League and the potent Methodist Board of Temperance, prefers to work quietly and without publicity in a campaign to dry up individual counties through local-option laws and gradually elect Congressmen favorable to their cause. Many of the nation's 100-odd dry organizations energetically employ both techniques.

Of the 3,050 counties in the U.S., 934 have already been dried or partially dried since repeal of the 18th Amendment, (Kansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma are totally dry states.) The prohibition goal for 1944: to dry up 66 more counties, for a grand total of 1,000 and a round one-third of all the counties in the land.

*For a calmer, more factual view, see p. 62.

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