Old King Alcohol

Outside the Senate's caucus room the late arrivals queued up in droves, box lunches in hand. Inside, the advance guard filled every one of the 555 seats, spilled out into the aisles, perched on the window ledges and fixed the members of the Senate's Interstate Commerce Committee with a battery of baleful eyes. They were the drys--the dogged disciples of old Andy Volstead and Bishop James Cannon --and they had come to launch a new attack on the iniquities of demon rum.

They stoutly insisted that they were not urging a return to Prohibition this time. They simply wanted to pressure through a bill introduced by North Dakota's teetotaling William Langer, to prohibit the interstate use of liquor advertising by press and radio. They came armed with exhibits. Two ladies waved banners aloft made of the pasted-together pages of liquor ads from one issue each of U.S. magazines during the holiday season. They started with Newsweek (5 1/2 feet of ads); by the time they got to TIME,* the pennant was 12 feet of ads, LIFE was 14 feet and Esquire was 22 feet.

The Lures. Explained the Methodists' Bishop Wilbur E. Hanmaker: "We have allowed old King Alcohol too much liberty to lure our people into conditions where danger impends . . . Make no mistake as to the attitude of Mr. Average Man. He would rejoice ... if all liquor ads were cast into some limbo of outer and everlasting darkness."

One by one, more than 40 witnesses rose to second his stand. The Rev. Button Peterson of New York lit into the insidious appeal of liquor ads, which--said he --caricature the drys as "killjoys and scarecrows while portraying drinking as the only sure road to fame and beauty." Snapped the W.C.T.U.'s President Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, lapsing into the lingo of Prohibition: "It is false and misleading not to put the label 'Poison' on it."

The Rebuttal. The distillers too were out in force: they might ridicule, but they did not minimize the drys. They were painfully aware that 857 of the nation's 3,069 counties now have local Prohibition; since 1940, the drys had made a net gain of 266 communities in local option elections. The distillers argued that the drys were really trying to sneak Prohibition back, which would disrupt agriculture, throw thousands out of jobs and deprive the U.S. Treasury of $2 billion a year in liquor taxes. As to Langer's argument that whisky ads should be compelled to talk about the evils of liquor instead of making men of distinction out of drinkers, the distillers had an answer for that. Why not force automobile makers to run pictures of wrecks instead of new models, since automobiles kill more than 30,000 people a year?

No one expected the committee's own men of distinction to report out the bill. A similar measure, long urged by Kansas' former Senator Arthur Capper, had died of neglect in the 80th Congress. But the dry-throated voice of Prohibition was being heard again in the land.

*TIME receives an average of 500 letters a year protesting liquor ads in it. A good many, though not all, of the letters indicate that they are part of an organized campaign of letter writing to major magazines. TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE set a quota on liquor ads: 10% of their annual advertising space.

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