Ladies on the March

In Evanston, Ill., last week a band of serious, middling-to-elderly ladies, the brain trust of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, clucked appreciatively over a Gallup poll on Prohibition sentiment. After eight years of Repeal, 36% of the Gallup-checked electorate said they were willing to try Prohibition once again.

The Evanston ladies were cheered by that news, but they were worried about something else. They feared that, before Prohibition came again, youths of the Army would be seduced into swilling beer at taverns near their camps. God forbid, said the ladies, that World War II should produce a nation of beer drinkers. Weren't things bad enough, with the U.S. overrun with cigaret smokers who got the habit in World War I?

The W.C.T.U. ladies have little hope of talking soldiers & sailors out of their thirst. Their strategy is to worry legislators into drying up local areas all over the country. Their favorite piece of legislation is the Sheppard Bill, now receiving the lackluster attention of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. The bill combines three pious prohibitions: 1) of prostitution in camp areas; 2) of the sale of all liquor in camps themselves; 3) of liquor in areas around the camps.

Introduced a year ago by the late Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, the Sheppard Bill was almost entirely written by dynamic, bright-eyed, 70-year-old Mrs. Ida B. Wise Smith, now serving her ninth term as W.C.T.U. president. A onetime resident of Iowa, where she scared the State Legislature silly, she is a great backroom politician, rates high with reporters, to whom she furnishes plenty of sprightly copy.

Mrs. Smith would like to see restored the old Army Canteen Act of 1901, prohibiting all liquor on military reservations --with an added prohibition against liquor in nearby areas. Like all W.C.T.Uers, Mrs. Smith does not believe in moderation. She wants total abstinence and no back talk. Would you, she inquires, recommend opium, in moderation?

Mrs. Smith and her helpers were considerably annoyed last week by the activities (presumably) of a rich group of freelance prohibitionists in Chicago, who had begun sending 500,000 packs of playing cards, whose backs were inscribed with anti-bibbing slogans from Othello, to camps throughout the nation. Whatever the soldiers thought of the slogans, they found that, with four different quotations per pack in the first decks sent out, they could soon make a good guess at what opponents had in their hands. The W.C.T.U. was highly embarrassed when it got credit for issuing the cards. Mrs. Smith and her girl friends are as stern opponents of gambling as they are of beer.

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