United Repeal Council

Extra telegraphers had to be employed at Tarrytown, N. Y. last week to handle an avalanche of messages for John Davison Rockefeller Jr. People all over the land were excited because he had regretfully abandoned the Cause which he and his father & mother had supported with speech, prayer and at least $434,000. From Tarrytown to Tallahassee and Tacoma the news had flashed when he publicly endorsed Nicholas Murray Butler's call for out-&-out repeal of Prohibition (TIME, June 13).

While elated Wets hailed Mr. Rockefeller into their fold as a convert and a damaging loss to the opposition, Drys damned him for a turncoat. "Unfortunately for your conception and interpretation you live in a stupefying, benumbing atmosphere of New York,"* wrote one-time Congressional Dry-leader William David ("Earnest Willie") Upshaw from the corn liquor country of Georgia. "Dr. Butler is an unsafe mentor for a high class, unsophisticated Christian like you."

Bishop James Cannon Jr., the South's arch Dry, sounded the same note: "Mr. Rockefeller's attitude is doubtless sincere, but it's not surprising to those who know the influences which surround him, living as he does where literally Satan's seat is, in the home of Alfred E. Smith, of Jimmy Walker and of the Tammany Tiger. "/-

In Chicago, whither she had journeyed to work & pray against repeal platforms by either political party, Mrs. Henry W. Peabody of the Woman's National Committee for Law Enforcement announced: "He will hardly feel at home in the jubilant company of outlawed brewers and Wet attackers of the Constitution. I've known John since he was a boy and his statement makes me very sad."

Mr. Rockefeller also went to Chicago.

Elated but not motivated by the Rockefeller pronouncement, the leaders of the six militant Wet organizations met in Manhattan's Empire State Building, organized themselves into a United Repeal Council, mightiest Wet body yet to be washed up by the anti-Prohibition groundswell. Chosen chairman of the Council, which claims to represent a membership of 2,500,000 citizens, was Pierre Samuel du Pont. The Council decided to hold a mass meeting in Chicago on the eve of the Republican National Convention, after which it will go about trying to get the 18th Amendment out of the Constitution just as Prohibitionists went about putting it in-by the slow process of electing public officials favorable to their cause. "I hope Mr. Rockefeller will take an active part in the movement," said Chairman du Pont, "though I feel it would be premature to invite him to do so."

Mr. Rockefeller's announcement moved many people to change their views, emboldened others to speak their minds.

John Raleigh Mott, president of the World's Alliance of Y. M. C. A. and executive committee member of the Allied Forces for Prohibition, long a friend and beneficiary of the Rockefeller family, was in Scotland when he heard the news. Promptly he. too, plumped for Prohibition reform. While opposed to outright repeal, he favored a non-political national referendum. Another prominent Prohibitionist, Stanley High, who quit managing editing the Christian Herald to found a Dry daily in Manhattan (not yet founded) believed that it was time "for the Drys to re-examine their case." Month before he had come out for referendum.

Still another Wet convert of the week was Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., president of General Motors, who declared: "My own views have been reversed. The road toward greater temperance is through repeal. . . . The experiment has resulted in failure."

Also on the heels of the Rockefeller switch, William Gibbs McAdoo, longtime temperance champion, came out with a defensive proposal. The legal machinery for resubmission or repeal would grind too slowly to be effective, thought he. Although legalists had argued that the Constitution does not provide for popular balloting on general questions. Lawyer McAdoo observed that the Congress was empowered "to provide for the general welfare of the United States." He proposed that the next President call a special session of Congress to empower him to proclaim "a national advisory referendum." Well aware that this liberal Prohibitionist policy was the dangerous procedure of fighting fire with fire, Mr. McAdoo macadoodled: "I would accept the challenge with supreme confidence."

*Last week, after a two-month survey based "upon the best information available," Prohibition Director Amos Walter Wright Woodcock estimated that there were 3,844 places in Manhattan to buy liquor. Until razed to make way for Rockefeller Center, many a speakeasy flourished within a cork-pop of the Rockefeller town house in West 54th Street.

/-Bishop Cannon's second wife, before he married her, used to occupy an apartment on Manhattan's West 85th Street.

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