Dry Hope

Herbert Hoover went into the White House last week as the Dry Hope of all U. S. Prohibitors. He will, they assured one another, be the right man at last to catch and hold that greased and perhaps blind pig called Prohibition. They recalled Harding and the well-filled whiskey flask (for medicinal purposes) in his White House office desk, and Coolidge, dry as a Vermont tinder box but deficient in the hot crusading flame of the true prohibitor. Now--bless the day--had come a President in whom for years has been seen a steady, scientific glow of enthusiasm for social uplift.

Consolidation. Dry organizations therefore marched forward to take up front-rank positions about the White House, close to Mr. Hoover's blue serge shoulder. Last week in Philadelphia the executive committee of the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, after sending an emissary to Washington, joined its Department of Moral Welfare with 30 other temperance organizations "for a unified plan for observance of the 18th Amendment, in accordance with the wishes of the administration of President Hoover." The Anti-Saloon League was included in this Presbyterian announcement and the Presbyterians made it sound as though the political stigma that has long attached to the League's name was going to be submerged, by merging all Dry efforts in a purely educational campaign. "The cultivation of public opinion for law observance" is to be the slogan of the U. S. Drys, consolidated.

Intentions. President Hoover's administrative notebook, under Prohibition, contains two entries:

1) Investigation. When a wise man finds himself lost in a forest of political controversy, he sits on a stump and sends out friends to scout for bearings. That is what President Hoover will do on Prohibition. In the campaign, voters asked him what his position was, what his plans were. Not sure himself, he replied: "I do not favor the repeal of the 18th Amendment. I stand for the efficient enforcement of the law. . . . Grave abuses have occurred. An organized searching investigation of fact and causes can alone determine the wise method of correcting them." Congress last week voted $250,000 "for such inquiry into the problem of law enforcement, including national prohibition, as the President may direct."

2) Transfer, from the Treasury to the Department of Justice, of Federal enforcement. As old as the Volstead Act is the question of which department should enforce prohibition. It went to the Treasury because that department had long collected liquor taxes. Under Harding no good prohibitor would trust the task to Harry Micajah Daugherty's Department of Justice. President Hoover now favors the change, and his rejection of his close friend William J. Donovan as Attorney-General seemed prompted, aside from alleged politico-religious considerations,* by his desire to entrust future enforcement in the Department of Justice to a personal and constitutional Dry.

Legislation. Prohibition was the yeast of the last hours of Congress. The final brew was in two batches:

1) An act, drawn by Senator Jones of Washington, to increase the penalties for Volstead violations. Congress wanted to punish habitual violators more memorably than at present, and a peculiar phrase was inserted in the act instructing judges to "discriminate." The rest of the act was also peculiar, because:

It eliminated the present legal distinction between first and subsequent offenses. It raised the top fine for second offenders from $2,000 to $10,000.

It set a five year maximum sentence for all violations of the Volstead Act, thereby making any infraction of this law a felony whereas before minor first offenses had been only misdemeanors* Several misdemeanors are necessary to deport an undesirable alien. For one felony he may be sent promptly out of the U.S. By this penal change alien bootleggers may be shipped swiftly from the country.

But, by inserting an "or" for an and it appeared to relieve second offenders ot the certain prospect of receiving both a fine and imprisonment.

2) For enforcement of the law Congress voted a routine $37,000,000 and then an extra $3,000,000, the purpose of which seemed to be--in the minds of its Dry proponents--to show President Hoover that money would be no object if he would really take enforcement seriously.

It was a far cry from $24,000,000, which Georgia's Dry Senator Harris proposed for this extra appropriation, to $3,000,000 but contentment shone upon the face of Prohibitor F. Scott McBride, chief of the Anti-Saloon League, who, while hovering about the Capitol to see that some bill was passed, heard himself called "the Super-President of the United States."

Contented. also was Georgia's Harris. He, speaking the Anti-Saloon mind, said:

"I have won the principle. The administration has recognized that more money is needed."

*Mr. Donovan is a Roman Catholic. *In Federal practice a misdemeanor is any offense against the U. S. carrying a maximum penalty of less than one year in jail; a felony, more than one year.