Front Man

One of the most graceful aspects of 20th-century industrialism is the practice of a trade group hiring an impeccable individual to sponsor it at the court of public opinion. Like baseball after the "Black Sox" scandal and the cinema following the Arbuckle case, last week the U. S. liquor business, acutely aware that it exists by sufferance, acquired a highly respectable front man. For a reputed $50,000 a year, William Forbes Morgan became a part of the Distilled Spirits Institute's "program for the enlargement of the scope of ... activities . . . with special reference to a broader policy of public relations whereby the problems and policies of the industry may have a better understanding with the American people."

Well qualified for his job is 53-year-old Front Man Morgan. He has an Oxford accent, a pretty wife, entree to both the House of Morgan and the White House, the former because he is J. P. Morgan's nephew, the latter because his deceased first wife was Mrs. Roosevelt's aunt and because he was Democratic treasurer in the last campaign. An investment banker by trade, Mr. Morgan went to Washington in 1933 as deputy governor of the Farm Credit Administration, met & married 23-year-old Sarah Jackson Coonley whose father was secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

The future "problems and policies" which the Spirits Institute feels it must solve and formulate were apparently considered by the industry as too "broad" to be handled by plugging, business-like Dr. James M. Doran. executive secretary who wet-nursed the business through the ordeal of Repeal regulations, or Distiller Owsley Brown of Louisville, whom Mr. Morgan replaces as the Institute's president. What the Institute was out for was a Tsar of high power, smoothness and influence. In fact, among those first approached was none other than Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley.

In general, the Institute's and Tsar Morgan's problems are two : how to defeat or placate temperance sentiment, how to stop bootlegging. In the grass roots States Dry sentiment has not only survived Repeal but gives signs of flourishing. In the 31 States which permit local option, Drys succeeded in promoting 3,000 referenda in 1936 and winning half of them. Last week the House of Representatives of Kansas, one of the seven States in which hard liquor is entirely prohibited, passed a bone-Dry law prohibiting beer, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union has launched a drive for $1,000,000 with the avowed intention of restoring Prohibition before 1945. Distillers who remember that the Volstead Act was preceded by just such an accumulation of Dry spots are ready to devote a large share of their considerable earnings* to the defense of their trade.

Accordingly, the advertising watchword of the $2,000,000,000 liquor industry, sounded by Seagram's in the first weeks of Repeal and since echoed in the publicity of most of the big whiskey makers, is MODERATION.

Taking his pitch from this well-plugged tune, Tsar Morgan announced as he took over last week: "The Institute does not propose to do anything that is not open. It regards liquor as a tonic and a refreshment and is opposed to its use for excessive stimulation. Those of us who are members of that party which is responsible for the return of legal liquor are anxious to see that the liquor industry is conducted on the highest plane possible."

On the lowest plane possible from the standpoint of licensed distillers are the smalltime bootleggers who still sell any where from 15% to 50% of the liquor consumed in the U. S. The field force of the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue has been increased from about 1,400 to 1, 800 in two years. During 1935, agents seized 16,680 illegal stills with a total daily capacity of 1,668,000 gal. If they had been operated only on an average of three weeks before seizure their total illicit production that year was some 35,000,000 gal. Tax-paid withdrawals of distilled spirits during 1935 amounted to 82,816,000 gal.

Noisiest campaigners against bootlegging are Repeal Associates, an organization whose leaders include such active citizens as Pierre S. du Pont, New York's Representative James Wadsworth and Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, Manhattan broker. Last month the Associates tried a new tack, wrote to all the big Dry organizations for support in the anti-bootlegging campaign. This gesture met the Drys at their most militant. "Kill your own skunks, we're interested in bigger game." trenchantly replied Fred A. Victor, superintendent of the New York Anti-Saloon League. ''We didn't cause the bootlegger. . . . We're interested in killing the whole liquor industry. There will never be any peace or decency while liquor is around."

What Mr. Victor put with such point is also the attitude of those other reviving crusaders, the Methodist Episcopal Church Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals and the W.C.T.U. Impoverished by Depression and numbed by Repeal, these organizations lay low for two years while the parched citizenry refreshed itself. This year even the Anti-Saloon League has new funds, new spirit. Sending out the call for its annual convention in St. Petersburg, Fla. end of this month, the League last week trumpeted: ''Liquor conditions are worse now than ever before. The 107,851 old saloons have been replaced by 419,587 new, modern, efficient sales agencies. . . ."

To be as new, modern and efficient as the liquor trade is the aim of the Women's Christian Temperance Union's present $500,000 educational campaign. Last year it distributed a four-reel sound film entitled The Beneficent Reprobate in which appeared no drooling drunks or starving children but a frog named Elmer who passed out in a solution of 5% alcohol. W.C.T.U.'s national president is clever, plump, 65-year-old Mrs. Ida B. Wise Smith. An astute politician and public agitator, Mrs. Smith clicks off such anti-liquor statistics as the following: Rejections of insurance applicants for "heavy indulgence" by Northwestern National Life Insurance Co. increased from 17.6% in the year ending April 1932, to 23.8% in the year ending last April; admissions to Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital for acute alcoholism increased from 7,649 in 1934 to about 12,000 last year; arrests for drunkenness in the U. S. skyrocketed from 3.6% of all arrests in 1932 to 15.4% in 1936. Of the efforts of distillers to discourage excessive drinking Mrs. Smith says placidly:

"Every clear-thinking citizen knows that the liquor people in their moderation drives are simply trying to sell more liquor to a greater number of people."

*National Distillers Products Corp. last week reported 1936 net profit of $7,753,251 or $3.80 a share on its common, compared to $7,009,238 or $3.34 in 1935.

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