Men of Principle

One of this year's Nominees for President of the U. S. spent several anxious hours last week on the mezzanine floor of the Hotel La Salle, Chicago. He frowned often, conferred with friends, stared down his nose, hovered near a closed door behind which a meeting of his party's national executive committee was in session.

It was a harrowing time for the Nominee because the committee was debating, and soon would vote, whether or not he was to continue as a Nominee for the Presidency, whether or not he was to be withdrawn and returned to private life as just plain William F. ("Bill") Varney of Rockville Centre, Long Island, N. Y.

It was not that Nominee Varney had done anything, or was likely to do anything, to bring disgrace upon himself or the historic Prohibition Party. But some members of the party, believing that Nominee Varney could not possibly be elected, were for surrendering the party as an independent political unit and handing over its entire vote to Hooverism, the Dry defender against the dread and dripping Brown Derby.

Eventually the committee voted and Nominee Varney's suspense was over. By four votes to three, the committee voted that the Prohibition Party would continue. Its Nominee was still its Nominee and for him all good Prohibitionists would work, hope, vote. One of Nominee Varney's managers quickly announced: "The position of the majority was that this election is not a bona fide contest over the prohibition question, but a fake contest between the modification program of Governor Smith, on one side, and continued nullification by the Republican Party, on the other side."

Nominee Hoover could probably have merged the Prohibition Party into the G. O. P. by declaring specifically that one-half of one percent is, in his opinion, as strongly alcoholic as any U. S. beverage should ever be. But he made no such declaration, perhaps because he knew that about one-third of the Prohibition Party's vote is in California and likely to be Hooverish anyway; perhaps because he knew that the total Prohibition vote in 1924 was less than one-fifth of one percent of the total vote of the country (57,520 out of 29,091,417).