It's An Issue?

Storms are first forecast by those who fear them most. Storms in human affairs are often precipitated by sheer nervousness.

At the Democratic convention, where the present tension about Prohibition began to become national, the Drys were so much in the majority that there never was any serious likelihood of the party adopting a Wet plank. The law-enforcement plank that was adopted omitted a declaration against modification of the Prohibition laws for two reasons:

1) The nominee upon whom the party had decided was everywhere known to favor modification. To pledge the party against modification would have created an absurd impasse.

2) The nominee's reiteration of his pledge to enforce the law if elected could only be accepted, by Democrats, as the word of an honest man. His reiteration of his disbelief in the present form of Prohibition was neither startling nor offensive to sincere Prohibitionists in the party. They had known his position. They honored his candor. They doubted his power to change the law.

The outstanding Drys of the party reinforced this doubt with determination. Josephus Daniels said: "The primary duty of Democrats in the South and other sections is to stand by the ship and concentrate every effort in securing the election of a Democratic Senate and House which will give hearty support to Smith in every measure of reform in which we stand together. . . . But they should stand in Congress like a stone wall against any recommendation that Smith as President should make to modify the Prohibition enforcement act. . . ."

Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Governor Dan Moody of Texas refused to bolt the party because of what the nomi nee had said. Their attitude was, in effect: "We need and want Smith for many reasons. We can keep him in hand on this Prohibition matter, which is only one of many matters to be considered by the Democracy."

Thus far it was an issue within a party, and Nominee Smith did not hasten to force it further. He postponed his answer to Mr. Daniels until next month.

Nevertheless, all last week the land reverberated with alarums and Prohibition ceased to be a problem peculiar to the Democratic Party.

Secretary Ernest H. Cherrington of the World League Against Alcoholism cried out: "The gage has been thrown in what promises to be the greatest 'wet and dry' battle that the nation has ever seen."

David Leigh Colvin, national chairman of the Prohibition Party, thought the situation looked so serious that he turned reproachfully upon Prohibition's greatest promoter, the Anti-Saloon League, and flayed it as follows: "The Anti-Saloon League is not a party, and it is not even a league. It is merely a group of paid superintendents. The Anti-Saloon League has engaged in a number of shady political deals which have discredited it." Mr. Colvin, who was in Chicago arranging for the Prohibition Party's annual convention there this week, said that the Prohibition plan this year would be to back a Dry Democrat who might hamper Smith's progress in one or more States in the Solid South.

More drastic and determined was Herman Preston Paris of Clinton, Mo., the Prohibition Party's 1924 candidate for President. Mr. Paris said it might even be best to submerge the entity of the Prohibition Party and join forces with the Republicans to ensure Smith's defeat. Mr. Faris said: "The party at last has reached one of its goals--that of making Prohibition the major political issue before the voters of America."

Next to take the battlements for the Dry cause was the Jefferson-Lincoln League. Its president, one James A. Edgerton of Washington, called for a national convention in Chicago simultaneous with the Prohibition convention. A Jefferson-Lincoln League ticket was to be nominated and plans made for cooperating with the Forces of Reform.

The Asheville, N. C., conference and the Richmond, Va., convention called by some Southern ministers who carefully explained that they were acting as laymen and not as church officials (TIME, July 9), did not rouse enthusiasm among potent Democrats. The latter were, if anything, made more indignantly firm in their political faith by a curious development which these Southern stirrings took. Governor Moody of Texas joined Josephus Daniels in avoiding the Asheville conference. "I am a Democrat," he explained. "I do not believe in bolting the party." This remark brought forth a tirade from Mrs. Clem Lawrence Shaver of West Virginia. Mrs. Shaver is the high-strung wife of the chairman of the National Democratic Committee. She "works hard at little things" and delights in making public her personal opinions, regardless of how they may conflict with her husband's commitments. In August, 1924, she loudly flouted the Democracy's nominee for the Vice-Presidency because he, Charles W. Bryan, had opposed holding National Defense Day. She is chairman of the West Virginia division of the National Women's Democratic Law Enforcement League and in that capacity she last week cried out:

"Regardless of what Democratic leaders from top to bottom may do, we dry Democratic women will not support the dripping wet ticket and the joke platform named by the Tammany delegates. . . .

"The idea of men like Josephus Daniels, Joe Robinson, Carter Glass and Jed Adams* saying 'I'm a Democrat--I shall support the party nominee!'

"We say a man who will shut his eyes like an ostrich to the things which the Democratic Party has always stood for is a 'booze-o-crat,' not a Democrat.

"The Democratic nominee . . . stamped himself as a charlatan and a faker who is attempting to prove that Lincoln was wrong and that you can fool all the people all the time. . . ."

Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wife of Governor Smith's nominator, answered Mrs. Shaver: "There are women, of course, who consider the enforcement of the Volstead law more important than truth or fair play."

In politics, nothing is but talking makes it so. Tirades like Mrs. Shaver's, brewings within the Prohibition Party, stirrings of ministerial bosoms, are relatively unimportant--except as they stimulate discussion elsewhere. But that was not the effect of last week's beat-Smith Dry talk. It did not bring forth much comment from more significant quarters. All that it elicited from Dr. Hubert Work, new National Chairman of the G. O. P., who had already announced in no uncertain terms that the Tariff was to be the Issue of the campaign (see p. 8), was the following: "Prohibition is a local question. . . . This country will vote dry for economic reasons if for no other. . . .

"The promptings of conscience," he said, in a sentence of which more will be heard before November, "and personal liberty within the law, are not proper subjects for political debate. . . . Our people should vote to protect the American payroll, vastly larger than that of all the rest of the world."

He also said: "Should the Democrats inject the issue of Prohibition ... we will meet it promptly and vigorously."

*Jed Cobb Adams, National Democratic Committeeman for Texas.