Wets, Drys, Weaslers

Drinking Drys in the House from Maryland, Missouri, California, Delaware, Michigan and Pennsylvania spent a twitchy 24 hours last week under the threat of public exposure. The Senate Lobby Committee, pursuing its investigation of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, had commandeered from that organization's private files a confidential report on the Wet and Dry politics of Congressional districts in those six States and the personal drinking habits of each Representative. The report had been prepared by big lumbering Carter Field, onetime Washington correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, now a freelance political writer.* Indiana's Dry Senator Arthur Raymond Robinson, a lobby investigator, was piling into the inquiry's printed record these reports, without reading them, when Henry Hastings Curran, A. A. P. A. president, on the witness stand, after vain protestation, remarked: "Well, they'll make a good exhibit over in the House!"

Wisconsin's Wet Senator John James Blaine, glancing over the reports, also protested against their inclusion in the record until the full lobby committee had passed on them, induced Senator Robinson to hold them up temporarily. Said he:

"Take, for instance, this clause: '---- [a candidate for Representative] is a worse pussyfooter than ---- [another candidate for Representative]. He drinks beer in speakeasies and points to his glass when asked where he stands but will not say anything!"

It was not until the next day when the Lobby Committee met again that the drinking Drys of the House breathed easily once more. The Lobby Committee is four-to-one Dry. It voted three-to-one to bar the Field reports. Declared Montana's Dry-drinking, Dry-voting Senator Walsh: "We have agreed that, while these reports would be very interesting to the newspapers they are so remotely connected with [lobbying] that they should not be made public, as they would only cause embarrassment to a lot of people."

Wet complaints began to take shape in the Senate corridors against the Lobby Committee's obvious Dry bias. The committee was accused of stalling its inquiry of Wet organizations to give Dry organizations time to strip their letter files of all incriminating documents.

Another large turnup of the Lobby Committee's last week was a set of letters written by Thomas Wharton Phillips Jr. of Butler, Pa., an A. A. P. A. official, to Justice Stone and the late Justice Sanford of the U. S. Supreme Court. In these letters Mr. Phillips harangued the Justices on the evils of Prohibition and the failure of the courts to remedy conditions. Excerpts:

"If the Judiciary lies down on the job and follows the mob along the lines of least resistance, our form of government is doomed. . . . We have reached a critical stage, if not a real crisis, in our history. . . . Do you have any idea that the Supreme Court as now constituted would have the moral courage to go into this question?"

Senator Robinson professed to be horrified. He exclaimed: "It's the most amazing thing I ever heard of! . . . Indefensible! . . . Lobbying directly with the Supreme Court!"

Retorted nimble-witted Mr. Curran: "Just because a man is a judge you can't put him in a glass cage, like a bunch of asparagus, so he can never be in touch with the world at all."

Mr. Phillips explained that the judges were his personal friends, that he was not a lawyer making legal arguments against Prohibition, that his views were personal, that he had solicited no expression of opinion from his high judicial correspondents.

In much sharper focus last week than his Supreme Court letters was the campaign Mr. Phillips was waging as a Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania in this month's primary. A onetime Congressman who has grown rich in public utilities (oil and coal), he is large, rotund, married, father of five. His hair is grey, his face florid, his manner genial and approachable. He is running as an out-&-out Wet for the repeal of his State's enforcement act. Opposing him are Gifford Pinchot, a crusading Dry, and Francis Shunk Brown supported by both the Mellon and Vare factions of the G. O. P. Mr. Brown has declared for a Prohibition referendum, is classed as a political weasler on this issue.

Mr. Phillips has the vigorous backing of the A. A. P. A. which has lately run its Pennsylvania membership up from 1,000 to 40,000. He is making a loud, strenuous campaign, has sent cars equipped with loudspeakers all over the State to broadcast his Wet appeal.

Few if any political prophets concede Mr. Phillips a chance of nomination. Yet he is a prime primary factor because he may draw from Mr. Brown, the regular candidate, enough votes to give Mr. Pinchot the nomination. The great Pennsylvania question: will Wet voters put party above Prohibition? In the House Pennsylvania's scholarly and aristocratic Congressman, James Montgomery Beck, is a most eloquent Wet. In politics he is a part of Boss Vare's Philadelphia machine. Lately he appealed to voters to support Mr. Brown, who had weasled on Prohibition, rather than Mr. Phillips who stood with him on this issue. Mr. Phillips' comment: "Oh, fiddle faddle!"

Mumbling and shifty on the Prohibition issue in Pennsylvania, weasling as best they can, are James John Davis and Joseph Ridgway Grundy, candidates for the Republican senatorial nomination.

* When the Lobby Committee disclosed his undercover connection with the A. A. P. A. at $600 per month Mr. Field, as custom required, resigned from the Senate Press Gallery.

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