"It Isn't Done"

Fashionable U. S. dinner-table conversations will flourish without alcoholic stimulation if the hopes of Mrs. George Holt Strawbridge, Philadelphia socialite, are realized. Last week she began to form a national committee of First Family Ladies who will keep their guests liquorless to propagate the idea that drinking "simply isn't done."

Mrs. Strawbridge acknowledged her debt for the idea to Mrs. Edward Beale McLean, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, who served no liquor at her Easter party to set a law observance fashion and please President Hoover. Mrs. Strawbridge wrote to ladies of Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, New York. She inquired "whether it would be possible to constitute a committee of women of your own standing in the social world, who would interest themselves in creating sentiment for observance of the Prohibition laws within their own circles. My eventual desire," said she, "is to form a national committee composed of national groups all over the country."

In Mrs. Strawbridge's plan, refinement is the keynote, for she proposes "no spectacular crusade, no public meetings, no newspaper publicity--nothing of that sort at all. My thought is simply that if people whose wealth and position clothe them with the power of example can be induced to set an example, as Mrs. Mc-Lean is trying to do, we could be of inestimable aid to the President. . . . "

The Strawbridge movement appeared to be in retort to the work of fashionable Mrs. Charles Hamilton Sabin of Manhattan and other founders of the new Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, whose object is to stamp out the hypocrisy of dry-voting by wet-drinkers and get the law changed (TIME, June 10). Socially formidable antagonists to Mrs. Strawbridge in Philadelphia will be Mrs. Archibald Barklie, Novelist Agnes Repplier, Mrs. Herbert Lincoln Clark, all of the W. O. N. P. R.