Wind-Up

With not a vote visibly changed the House Judiciary Committee last week wound up its Wet-&-Dry hearings. Its members had patiently heard in 16 days almost one million words from 60 Wet, 65 Dry witnesses. Wets will be given a brief rebuttal period, with the Drys making an even briefer surrebuttal. The evidence, which has cost the U. S. $5,000 to take down and print, leaves the Wets still wet, the Drys still dry. As everyone knew when the hearings began in February, no changes in the law will be recommended by the committee.

Professional Prohibitors who last week put their views before the House committee were: Dr. Francis Scott McBride of the Anti-Saloon League, Edwin Courtland Dinwiddie of the National Temperance Bureau, Elbert Deets Pickett of the Methodist Episcopal Church Board of Prohibition, Temperance & Public Morals, Canon William Sheafe Chase of the International Reform Federation, and Eugene L. Crawford of the Board of Temperance and Social Service of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. These witnesses were spared the ordeal of direct testimony and cross-examination by Wet committee members, when Chairman Graham, to save time, adjourned the hearing and permitted the witnesses to file prepared statements. New York's Wet Congressman La Guardia wailed his disappointment: "And here I've been waiting ten years for a chance to examine these witnesses!"

The Dry summations were largely a rehash of the routine publicity outpourings of the Dry organizations represented. Their common points: Prohibition is a great economic, social and moral success; liquor has always bred official corruption; all good citizens should "observe the law and throttle nullification.''

More effective than the praise which professional Prohibitors heap upon the job that gives them their daily bread, was a temperate, well-seasoned statement filed by Prof. Irving Fisher, Yale economist. Professor Fisher adroitly admitted most of the facts against which Wets have complained but insisted that even these facts do not outbalance the larger benefits of Prohibition. He charted the rise and fall of Prohibition as follows:

"When in 1919 and 1920 Prohibition was a 'new broom, it swept clean.' Since then we went backward for a time . . . but at no time to where we started. . . . We seem now to be passing through Prohibition at Its Worst. . . . The liquor problem, like the race problem, is an insoluble problem and will remain so for at least a generation. . . . All the evils of Prohibition claimed by the Wets exist. . . . But what is their program for coping with these evils? Virtually they have none, because they have so many and none of them practicable."

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