A Fool, Maybe

Members of the 67th Congress (1921-23) were not surprised last week to hear that their most eccentric colleague, Manuel Herrick, 54, Republican, of the Eighth Oklahoma District, had been arrested by Federal Dry agents while firing for $15 per week the boiler of a 500-gal. still in the remote reaches of St. Mary's County, Md. They well remembered Congressman Herrick's notorious exploits during his two years at the Capitol--the beauty contest he ran from his office in the House Office Building which resulted in a breach of promise suit against him; the $7,500 slander suit his secretary, Miss Ethelyn Crane, won against him; the 1-c- verdict he was awarded in a breach of promise suit against Miss Crane; his desire to be the "dare-devil aviator of Congress" and his purchase of many an old Army plane that would not fly.

The last time most of his fellow Congressmen had seen him was on the session's closing day when, snoring loudly, he napped on a lounge in the House lobby, with a white lily in one hand, in the other a bill for Federal eradication of venereal diseases by an expenditure of $50,000,000. Said he on leaving the Capitol : "The smell of liquor on all sides has sickened me."

When, clad in blue overalls, he was arrested last week, he claimed that he was an undercover agent of the U. S. Prohibition Bureau working at the still to get evidence. The Department of Justice admitted he had sought such a job last month but denied that he had been hired. Jailed with a Negro because he could not furnish $1,500 bail, he mused:

"When I was in Congress, I had as much as $50,000 in bills stacked on my desk-- dishonest money. But I said to them: 'Take it away!' Maybe I was a fool."

Herrick, a cattleman and farmer in Oklahoma's "Cherokee strip," was elected to Congress in 1920 by the sudden death of his chief opponent and that year's Republican landslide. In 1922 he campaigned vainly for re-election with a speech entitled: "Two Years in Congress, or Through Hell and Back."

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