Return of the Drys

In the sub-basement of Washington's old House Office Building, a tall greying man with intense eyes and a lean, unsmiling face prayed for drought. Edward Page Gaston, brother of anti-cigaret Crusader Lucy Page Gaston, hoped that World War II would bring Prohibition II.

As founder and U.S. director of the World Prohibition Federation, Brother Gaston is a spokesman for the W.C.T.U., the Anti-Saloon League and some 100 other temperance societies. He has kneeling space in the House Office Building by permission of his good friend Ulysses S. Guyer, dry Congressman from dry Kansas, who rises occasionally on the House floor to tack (so far, in vain) a prohibition joker on to other legislation.

Last week Guyer, Gaston and like-minded men & women throughout the land saw war move their goal closer. In Congress were a half-dozen bills to regulate alcohol traffic. One of them, a Senate resolution which would prohibit liquor sales in & around military establishments, could conceivably be used (by a Prohibitionist Secretary of War) to dry up whole areas of the nation.

In Washington's New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Brother Gaston announced a "sweeping national campaign" for wartime prohibition. He gave alcohol a large share of the blame for the fall of France and the Pearl Harbor tragedy, concluded hopefully that "America should soon be dry again, and next time Prohibition will come to stay as a success." Congressional mimeograph machines, by courtesy of Guyer, scattered his message over the U.S.

A more imminent threat to U.S. drinkers was the Office of Production Management, which pondered an order requiring distilleries to switch to industrial alcohol needed for munitions and plastics (see p. 61). Hopeful note for tipplers: even if all whiskey production were stopped immediately, stocks now aging in warehouses would last four years.

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