Taft Conversion

The conversion of the late great William Howard Taft from Wet to Dry was the high spot of last week's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, sitting in judgment on measures to modify or repeal national Prohibition./- In 1918 Mr. Taft, as Yale's Kent Professor of Law, was an avowed Wet. He wrote letters, later widely quoted, to his friend, Allen Lincoln of New Haven, opposing the 18th Amendment, predicting dire results from its ratification (TIME, Oct. 15, 1928). In 1923, as Chief Justice, he made a Yale commencement speech in which he called on all citizens to be "sportsmen," "to play the game by observing and supporting the law" (TIME, Dec. 10, 1928).

Last week his younger brother, Headmaster Horace Dutton Taft of Taft School (Watertown, Conn.), a brother tall, thin and angular but full of the Taft good-humor, produced a private letter William Howard Taft had written just after Herbert Hoover's election, to Prof. Irving Fisher, Yale economist, militant dry. Headmaster Taft explained he was offering this evidence to offset all erroneous interpretations of his brother's position on Prohibition.

Excerpts from the Taft-to-Fisher letter:

". . . In the late campaign I found myself in a very awkward situation. I could not issue any publication, because of my being on the bench and vet the New York

World published my anti-prohibition letters written to Lincoln before the adoption of the Amendment and then nobody seemed to take the trouble to publish my speech at Yale after the Amendment was adopted.

"But the result is glorious and points the only way we have to work out the problem presented.

"The solution requires a great deal of time and patience. The habits of an important section of a congested part of the country cannot be changed overnight or in years. The reform and the adaptation of society to that at which the amendment aims must be gradual. The temptation of corruption will drag it out.

"While looking ahead at the amendment I despaired of any success. I really think that it is possible, if we keep at it, to achieve a satisfactory result. The persistence with which the people maintain in Congress a two-thirds majority in both houses gives me much hope, and I am inclined to think that this will wear down the moderate Wets to a consciousness that the only solution is pressure in favor of enforcement."

Drys jubilated, Wets expostulated, over Mr. Taft's phrase: "The result is glorious." What might have developed into a controversy as famed as the one that raged over Calvin Coolidge's "I do not choose," was averted when Prof. Fisher agreed that the result which Mr. Taft found glorious was not the state of Prohibition but the 1928 presidential election, main subject of the letter.

Mellow and temperate, with a voice that trailed away vaguely, Schoolmaster Taft gave some Dry views of his own: "There may be a larger percentage of college men drinking today but the drunkenness is not one-twentieth what it was in my day. The scenes I've seen in New Haven if found there today would be cabled all over the world."

Other witnesses of the week included : Josephus Daniels, publisher of the Raleigh (N. C.) News & Observer, President Wilson's Secretary of the Navy who, in 1914, abolished alcohol on all U. S. warboats. He declared himself ready to keep up the fight to enforce Prohibition for a century; if necessary, at a cost of $300,000,000 per year. Exclaimed he: "The law can be enforced! Even when only partial efforts are made, drinking and drunkenness have greatly decreased. I don't think anybody believes Prohibition is wholly successful but no well-informed person will say it has had a fair chance in all parts of the country. The opposition has resorted to propaganda to manufacture opinion against enforcement."

Daniel Calhoun Roper, South Carolina Democrat, under whom, as President Wilson's Commissioner of Internal Revenue, national Prohibition enforcement began. Loud have been Wet pleas for a U. S. liquor dispensary system. Only in South Carolina from 1893 to 1907 was such a system ever attempted on a large scale. It was Mr. Roper who, as a State legislator, sponsored the bill creating it. To the Judiciary Committee Mr. Roper recited the history of that liquor experiment in his State, described the "whiskey rebellion" at Darlington, the bootlegging, graft and corruption which finally led to the law's repeal as a failure and South Carolina's movement toward State Prohibition. Under questioning, he admitted that local conditions then were "not dissimilar" to national conditions now. His remedy: "I would get a group of men on the Wet side to sit down with a group of men on the Dry side to meet this situation in a constructive moving way. . . . To date the law has not had a fair chance. We need a national conference to educate the people, to popularize the law and get everybody behind and say: 'Let's try this thing out seven years and then, if the law cannot be enforced, make some change.' "

Evangeline Cory Booth, U. S. Commander of the Salvation Army. She sent the committee a long endorsement of Prohibition, contended that the drop in the average age of girls "rescued" by her service's maternity home from 23 to 19 years was due not to 'legged liquor but to "the wide use of the automobile."

To his sister-in-law, Mrs. Lenna Lowe Yost, stage-manager of Dry witnesses before the Committee. Fielding Harris ("Hurry Up") Yost, famed as University of Michigan football coach, sent this message for inclusion in the testimony: "College youth in America are not drinking as much as they did in pre-Prohibition days. No one is entirely satisfied with present conditions. ... It is unfortunate certain people of standing by example furnish a leadership to youth in law violation."

/- All testimony given last week was on the Dry side. Wets were given their innings first (TIME, Feb. 24 et seq.).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.