The Great Commission

The Great Commission

(See front cover)

The eleven eminent citizens whom President Hoover has constituted a commission to inquire into the law-breaking habits of their fellows, and into the nature of the laws which they break, and into the causes and circumstances of the breakage, headed last week for Washington to receive their instructions. George Woodward Wickersham, chairman, supped and slept at the White House, planning in advance with the President.

The commissioners had every reason to expect that their instructions would be broad, penetrating, exhaustive. President Hoover is not merely an astute politician. He has a mind which, given a curious pebble, wants at once to investigate a whole rock formation, an entire geologic age.

On the hot August day in California when Herbert Hoover accepted the Republican presidential nomination, he proposed "an organized, searching investigation" of Prohibition. That promise ferried him safely across the campaign to election. Congress thought of his proposal as primarily a Prohibition survey when, last winter, it appropriated $250,000 for the expenses.

By inaugural-time, President Hoover had expanded the commission-in-investigation idea far beyond the limits of Prohibition. He proposed then to go into the "entire question of law enforcement and organized justice." He tried to subordinate Prohibition in the inquiry, to make it only one of many elements to be scrutinized. To the agenda were added such matters as immigration violations, the jury system, anti-trust statutes, court procedure, narcotics, general disrespect for Law. In the President's re-explanations of the investigation, Prohibition dwindled almost out of sight.

Public opinion did not follow the President's line of thought. When the commissioners were announced last fortnight, all alert newspaper editors were quick to weigh them in Wet-and-Dry scales. Great were the stirrings among U. S. Drys, Consolidated, and U. S. Wets, Limited, to assemble debatable material to put before the commission. The President's legalistic examiners were lightly spoken of at Washington dinner tables as "highbrow highball homilecticians."

The U. S. Drys, Consolidated, particularly the Anti-Saloon League and the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals, were carefully watched to see if the President's broadening of the commission's scope would cause them to protest that their special handi work was not receiving its proper share of attention. But no protest came from the Drys, who viewed the commission as an agency that must inevitably recommend officially enforcement of a Reform which they effected unofficially. What they did mind was not having their hard-hitting prohibition enforcer, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, placed in charge. Nor was Mrs. Willebrandt particularly pleased with what some called a "snub" and last week intimated that she would resign her posi-tion as Assistant Attorney General.

Bishop James Cannon Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, lunched with President Hoover within a few hours of Chairman Wickersham's visit. One of the most politically potent members of U. S. Drys, Consolidated, Bishop Cannon viewed the commission's work thus: "Of necessity Prohibition law enforcement will be included in this study, not to determine whether the 18th Amendment is a mistake and should be repealed 'but to determine what educative and enforcement methods, including statutory legislation, will secure the best results. . . ."

Bishop Cannon's church's political arm announced: "The President is entirely right in seeing the problem of law enforcement in the U. S. . . . as something very much broader than the problem of enforcement of the prohibition law alone."

Dr. Francis Scott McBride, General Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, also expressed this view. The Press found him last week, not at the League's brick office-building overlooking the capitol, but in Charleston, W. Va., where, as a Presbyterian minister, he had gone to address a Methodist congregation on Prohibition.

Said he: "That the President has made his commission one that will embrace everything having to do with the enforcement of all laws will benefit Prohibition more than if he had asked for a commission to deal with Prohibition alone."

Superintendent McBride foresaw no debate on the merits of Prohibition before the Hoover commission. A recent four-month inspection of every state east of the Mississippi River and two states west of it had convinced him that Prohibition enforcement "was never so good as it is now."

Dr. McBride, the fifth of eleven children, was born in Ohio 57 years ago. On farm and in foundry he early began a life of toil. He turned to Prohibition as a student at Muskingum College. Though he lived to stand in the shoes of the late great Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, he never experienced a dramatic conversion to Prohibition like Wheeler's. Also an Ohio farm boy, Wheeler, a child of many questions, once infuriated a whiskey-soaked farmhand. The farmhand pursued the frightened youngster across a hayfield with a pitchfork and prodded him sharply just as he was climbing over the fence. Wheeler never forgot that thrust.

Dr. McBride's conversion was on religious grounds. He explained last week: "It is part of church work to let its influence be felt in a community in behalf of better government, to remove obstacles in the way of the Kingdom. Liquor is one of the obstacles the church must remove. Prohibition is right!"

In Washington as head of the Anti-Saloon League's lobby staff, he is rated prohibitor-in-chief, though few rank him with his predecessor Wheeler in mental agility, in smartness, in vigor. To this large, big-jawed man with unruly hair, drinking per se is a corrupt habit productive, for example, of the corruption of bribery in enforcement. That is but one of the crooked styles by which liquor makes crooked sixpence.

An interviewer last week asked Dr. McBride if he thought it would be fitting for the Hoover commission to investigate the Anti-Saloon's treasure chest to see to what extent the League is financed by persons who profit from Prohibition. Dr. McBride replied: "The commission will have matters of more importance than that to attend to. ... But we are not afraid of investigation of our donations."

Dr. McBride classified Chairman Wickersham and Commissioner Newton Diehl Baker as men who did not "favor Prohibition," but who were for enforcement. Other observers generally believed that the commission stood, in advance, six-to-four for Prohibition, with one member uncertain.

The unclassified member of the com-mission is the one woman on it, Miss Ada Louise Comstock, stately, broad-minded president of Radcliffe College. As a political independent, she has kept her Prohibition views strictly to herself. Soon after her appointment she was asked, of course, if she was related to the late great Reformer Anthony Comstock. She replied: "There is no traceable connection." Her legal credo is this: "I believe in as few rules as possible and a rigid enforcement of the rules that do exist."

As the commission went to work, there was no guessing when or where that work would end.