SINCE one o’clock this morning Prohibition has been a fugitive in the remote quagmires of the Bible Belt. The chase began thirteen hours earlier, when the resolutions committee of the convention retired to the voluptuous splendors of the Rose Room at the Congress Hotel. For four hours nothing came out of its stronghold save the moaning of converts in mighty travail. Then the Hon. Michael L. Igoe, a round-faced Chicago politician,1 burst forth with the news that the wet wets of the committee had beaten the damp wets by a vote of 35 to 17. There ensued a hiatus, while the quarry panted and the bloodhounds bayed. At 7 in the evening the chase was resumed in the convention hall, and four hours later Prohibition went out of the window to the stately tune of 9343/4 votes to 2131/4, or more than four to one. So the flight to the fastnesses of Zion began.
But even down there where Genesis has the police behind it, and an unbaptized man is as rare as a metaphysician, the fugitive is yet harried and oppressed. Only two States, Georgia and Mississippi, showed a solid dry front on the poll, and in Georgia there were plenty of wets lurking behind the unit rule. All the other great commonwealths of the late Confederacy cast votes for the immediate repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, led by Texas with its solid 46, and South Carolina with its solid 18. Even Tennessee, the Baptist Holy Land, went 18 dripping wet to 6 not so wet. Taking all the Confederate States together, with Kentucky thrown in, they cast 165 votes for the forthright and uncompromising plank of the majority, and only 123 for the pussyfooting plank of the minority. In the Middle West the carnage was even more appalling. Kansas voted 12 to 8 for the minority straddle, but Iowa went the whole hog with loud hosannas, and so did North Dakota, and so did Indiana and Illinois. Even Ohio, the citadel of the Anti-Saloon League, went over the enemy by 49 to 2, and Nebraska, the old home of William Jennings Bryan, voted nearly two to one for rum and rebellion.
It was a gorgeous affair while it lasted, and the consolations for the poor drys were precious few and not very stimulating. They held Mississippi, the Worst American State,2 and they held Oklahoma, and the better part of Arkansas, Alabama and North Carolina, but these States are all wobbling, and not even the most optimistic friend of the late holy cause expects them to hold out much longer.
The fight in the resolutions committee was full of dramatic surprises, but by the time it was transferred to the floor of the convention the end was plainly in sight, and so it narrowly escaped becoming a bore. When the really wet wets, led by Senator David I. Walsh, of Massachusetts,3 and Major E. Brooke Lee, of Maryland, went into the committee room they had but twenty-three States pledged to their side, and they needed twenty-eight. Major Lee professed to be sure that he could snare them, but his confidence was anything but visible in his face. A long, long wait followed, with a gang of reporters buzzing around the keyhole. Nothing came out of it, and the statesmen who emerged at intervals turned out to be deaf and dumb. The hotel was as hot as a boiler-room, and every time the door opened the eminent men within could be seen mopping their bald heads.
Suddenly, at 3 o’clock, the Hon. Mr. Igoe popped out.
“The vote,” he bawled, “is 35 to 18.”
“For what?” demanded the reporters.
“Against the majority plank.”
“Do you mean that the wet wets have substituted the Walsh plank?”
“Not yet,” replied Igoe. “One thing at a time. First we had to reject the majority plank. Now we’ll take up –”
But at that precise moment another statesman burst out with the news that it was done—that the Walsh plank had been substituted by a vote of 35 to 17. What became of the odd vote was never made plain. Perhaps it was Igoe’s, and he forgot to cast it.
The session of the convention, meanwhile, had been postponed from noon to 1 o’clock, and then to 3, and then to 7. Everyone looked for the resolutions committee to wrestle with the Prohibition plank all afternoon, and maybe far into the night. But when the plank was reached, after a long and innocuous debate over the tariff, war debts and free silver, the fight was over in ten minutes. For the wet wets, reinforced by twelve converts, demanded a showdown instantly, and it proved that they had an overwhelming majority. Moreover, it proved that the majority on the floor would be very much larger, for in committee each State had only one vote, whereas on the floor it would cast a vote for every one of its delegates, and the big States were all on the wet wet side.
Thus the combat on the floor last night was really only a sham battle, though it lasted more than three hours. When former Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock, of Nebraska,4 got on his legs to read the report of the committee—which is to say, to read the platform—there was such turmoil in the hall that Chairman Walsh had to bang for order over and over again. But when Mr. Hitchcock approached the Prohibition plank there was a sudden hush, and the instant the first sentence of it was out of his mouth the roof was shaken by a stupendous cheer. At once the delegations began parading, led by South Carolina from the traitorous Bible Belt and Iowa from the recreant open spaces of the Middle West. Mississippi held out, and so did Virginia, Washington, Oklahoma, Delaware, North Carolina and Alabama, but there was almost as much politeness in this as fidelity, for three hours later the seven of them were to yield 381/2 wet wet votes.
The first rhetorician put up to speak for the minority report, which had been the majority report until the catastrophe in the Rose Room, was the Hon. Cordell Hull, of Tennessee. Hull is a Prohibitionist of long service and heroic deeds, and only three days ago Col. Patrick H. Callahan, the lone Catholic dry,5 was telling me that he would be the last stalwart to surrender to the rum demon. And yet here he was pleading for resubmission of the Eighteenth Amendment! Not a word did he utter in favor of Prohibition. All he had to say was that it would be better to put it on trial in a decorous and judicial manner, and not butcher it out of hand. The crowd yelled him down.
“You are proposing to repeal Prohibition,” he yelled, “after only a few hours’ consideration.”
“Twelve years,” yelled someone in the gallery, and once more Chairman Thomas J. Walsh6 had to get out his bung-starter and clout for order. It came after a while and the long debate proceeded. All sorts of orators were put up. Some of them hollered for as little as two minutes. Most of them were local dignitaries, eager only to reach the radio audience back home. They offered little in the way of argument and nothing in the way of eloquence. Four-fifths of them seemed to be hotly in favor of the wet wet plank, but sometimes it was difficult to make out which side a given speaker was on.
One such was a gentleman from Texas, whose name seemed to be Hughes. He was introduced as a defender of what was now the minority plank and the crowd started to boo him, but at once he announced that Texas had decided unanimously to join the wet wets and so the boos began to be drowned in cheers. As he proceeded it appeared that he was actually arguing for the majority plank, which is to say, for light wines and beers immediately and the harder stuff on some near and blest tomorrow. Whether Chairman Walsh made a mistake in introducing him or he became converted to the wet wet doctrine while he was on his legs never appeared clearly. But the crowd decided that he was all right and when the gavel cut him short he was given a rousing hullabaloo for his pains.
The so-called debate went on in the brutal, clumsy, ribald manner that is almost as characteristic of a national convention as the Summer heat. Delegate after delegate, some male and some female, climbed up on the platform to heave another projectile at the vanishing shadow of Prohibition. They came not only from the traditionally wet and antinomian States but also from such, former paradises of Christian Endeavor as Florida, Iowa and South Carolina. Their names were often unintelligible, and what they had to say was only half heard. But now and then a notable was recognized and got his round of huzzahs. Thus it was that Jouett Shouse, of Kansas, leaping eagerly from his political tomb, was given his chance to hymn his fellow-corpse, the Hon. John J. Raskob, and to say all over again that Prohibition is, was and of a right ought to be a great c
urse to humanity.7
Some of these snorters against it looked to me to be very recent converts. In fact, not a few of them appeared to be still packing Bibles on their hips, and more than one did his stuff in the ecstatic singsong of a retrieved hell-cat at a revival. The debate was supposed to proceed in the orthodox manner, with each side using half the time, but it was soon apparent that the opponents of the wet wet plank had very few word-heavers on their string, and that none of them was actually dry. The best was probably a gentleman from Idaho, who looked like a prosperous cattleman, and made a plea for a simple resubmission of the Eighteenth Amendment without any party commitment either one way or the other. He was heard more or less politely until he squared off and demanded “Is it fair to say that in order to qualify as a Democrat a man must be wet?” Shouts of “Yes! Yes!” went up from both the floor and the galleries and the services had to be halted to give the ultra-wets a chance to howl off some of their libido.
The setpiece of the debate was the speech of Al Smith. When he suddenly appeared on the platform, his face a brilliant scarlet and his collar wet and flapping about his neck, he got a tremendous reception and the overgrown pipe organ let loose with “East Side, West Side” in an almost terrifying manner, with every stop wide open and a ton or so of extra weight on the safety valve. Al did a very good job. He had at Hoover with some excellent wisecracks, he made some amusing faces, and he got a huge and friendly laugh by pronouncing the word radio in his private manner, with two d’s. He had sense enough to shut down before he wore out his welcome, so he got another ear-splitting hand as he finished, with the organ booming again and the band helping.
Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland8 had been told off to second AI’s efforts, but a lot of obscure wet wets were panting to be heard by the folk back home, and he had to wait nearly two hours. He put in the time on the platform, mopping his neck, for the heat increased as the evening wore on, and by midnight it was that of Washington on a muggy August afternoon. In the end the Governor came near being robbed of his chance by a stout old fellow named W.C. Fitts, with a glittering bald head and bushy white eyebrows.
Fitts turned out to be from Birmingham, Ala., and he arose to plead with the delegates to abate their wet fervor a trifle, so as to avoid putting the party on a series of red-hot spots in the surviving dry strongholds of the Bible country. He had a plausible case, and he urged it in a reasonable manner. Not a word directly in favor of Prohibition came out of him. He simply asked that the Southern delegates be spared the need of going home smelling too powerfully of the devil’s brews. But the crowd was hot for the wettest imaginable wetness, and pretty soon it began to boo him and to demand a vote. The old boy, however, stuck to the microphone, and whenever his syllogisms and exhortations were drowned out by the uproar Chairman Walsh went furiously to his rescue. He kept going, first and last, for at least twenty minutes and in the end he had his say. But he had got the galleries into such a lather that it began to look like suicide for Governor Ritchie to follow him.
Nevertheless, the Governor stepped into it, and at sight of him the crowd shed its impatience magically, and he got a rousing reception,9 with the organ booming “Maryland, My Maryland” and “Dixie.” He had prepared a speech running to a column in the Evening Sun, and it had been sent out to the four corners of the Republic by the press associations, but he wisely abandoned it and gave them something shorter and snappier. It made an excellent success, and when he sat down there was another roar, and the organ took another herculean hack at “Maryland, My Maryland.”
When the voting on the platform began at midnight it was apparent at once that the extreme wets had it all their own, and that the resubmission plank of the minority, though it went further than the Republican straddle, was too mild to poll any considerable vote. When Alabama split and Arizona cast its six votes for the majority plank the whole audience, delegates and visitors alike, began to cheer, and thereafter the voting was carried on in the traditional Democratic manner, to the tune of howls, bellowings and charges of fraud. Three delegations demanded polls and caused long delays, and there were numerous hot exchanges between the chair and the floor. But the wet vote rolled up steadily, and by the time Kansas was reached it was running two to one. When Massachusetts threw in thirty-six wet votes it rose to three to one, and at the end, as I have said, it was better than four to one.
Despite the slow tempo, the polling was full of dramatic episodes. Just as Iowa, for long a happy hunting ground for the Anti-Saloon League, went dripping wet with all its delegates on their legs, yelling and waving their hats, a courier entered the press stand with the news that Senator George W. Norris, of Nebraska, one of the last of the honest drys in Washington, had come out for resubmission and confessed that Prohibition was a cooked goose. Ten minutes later the Nebraska Democrats cast nine votes for the wet wet plank and only five for the damp one, with one delegate absent and another too alarmed and upset to vote. The sweep was really colossal. No comfort whatever was left for the drys. Two weeks ago the Republican convention threw them some bones, but the Democrats refused to do so. The plank adopted is the wettest ever proposed by even the most fanatical wet—in fact, it goes beyond anything that was so much as imagined a month ago or even two weeks ago. After the Republican convention the professional drys were full of hope that they would be able to intimidate the Democrats into compromise and futility. But the Democrats simply refused to be intimidated. Instead, they fell upon Prohibition with raucous hosannas, gave it a dreadful beating and then chased it back to the Bible swamps whence it came.
The professional drys gave up the fight yesterday morning. They are astute fellows and they saw, even before the wet leaders, which way the thing was going. I tried to find Bishop Cannon to hear his last words, but though he seemed to be in Chicago no one could locate him.10 He and his friends will now call a conference and prepare to arouse the Southern Bible students for Hoover again. But it will be much harder this time and they know it. In 1928 they had a candidate who could help them, for the legend of the Great Engineer was still in full blast. But now they are strapped to a corpse and the once so amiable Yahweh of the club and the search-warrant has deserted them.
The New Deal
From Wizards, Baltimore Evening Sun, May 27, 1935. I offer this as a specimen of my polemic against the New Deal, which started in the Spring of 1933 and went on until the approach of the American entrance into World War II adjourned free speech on public questions. I choose the following because it recalls facts about the New Deal personnel and modus operandi that tend to be forgotten
I TAKE the following from the celebrated New Republic:
In the Autumn of 1933, after General Johnson and his Blue Eagle had done their part, business began rapidly to decline. On a train coming back from a social workers’ meeting, Harry Hopkins and his assistant, Aubrey Williams, discussed with apprehension the coming Winter.… Hopkins said: “Let’s take a real crack at this. Let’s give everyone a job.” The title, the Civil Works Administration, was contributed by Jacob Baker.
And the following from the eminent Nation:
It is characteristic of Hopkins that he wasted no time meditating upon the stupendous problems and conflicts such a revolutionary scheme might engender. He talked it over with his aides – Baker, Williams and Corrington Gill—and from their discussion there emerged an equally brief memorandum outlining the scheme. With this memorandum in hand he trotted off to the white House one Wednesday afternoon in November. He went merely to enlist Roosevelt’s interest. He expected to be told to develop the idea and come back with a fuller outline. He still expected that when he left the White House that evening. But it so happened that he had caught the New Deal Messiah in one of his periods of infatuation with the spending art, and Hopkins literally woke up the next morning to discover that Roosevelt without further ado had proclaimed the CWA in effect.
The money began to pour out on November 16, 1933, to the tune of a deafening hullabaloo. By December 1 m
ore than 1,000,000 men were on the CWA pay roll; by January 18, 1934, the number reached 4,100,000. Press agents in eight-hour shifts worked day and night to tell a panting country what it was all about. The Depression, it was explained, was being given a series of adroit and fatal blows, above, below and athwart the belt. In six months there would be no more unemployment, the wheels of industry would be spinning, and the More Abundant Life would be on us. Brains had at last conquered the fear of fear.
What actually happened belongs to history. By the opening of Spring Hopkins had got rid of his billion, and the whole scheme had blown up with a bang. More people were out of work than ever before. The wheels of industry resolutely refused to spin. The More Abundant Life continued to linger over the sky line. There ensued a pause for taking breath, and then another stupendous assault was launched upon the taxpayer. This time the amount demanded was $4,880,000,000. It is now in hand, and plans are under way to lay it out where it will do the most good in next year’s campaign.
Go back to the two clippings and read them again. Consider well what they say. Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayer’s expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people’s money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer. They feel their oats, and are busting with ideas. For them, at least, the More Abundant Life has surely come in.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 48