MANNERS & MORALS: Deadlier Than Bullets

MANNERS & MORALS

Government-issue 3.2 beer is an innocuous, vaguely sudsy fluid which can be closely approximated by steeping a yeast cake and a tea leaf in a gallon of any good, mild barley water. But when U.S. prohibitionists heard that the Army was issuing it to the front-line soldiers in Korea at the rate of a can a day, they reacted almost as if G.I.s were being taught the opium habit.* As a result, the Department of Defense nervously directed General MacArthur to cut off the free beer issue immediately.

This set off a truly horrendous outcry last week from beer drinkers both at home & abroad. Michigan’s belligerent Democratic Congressman John Dingell trumpeted that the decision could mean sure death to thousands of troops. Beer is a “wholesome food drink,” he declared, but the water in Korea is so full of typhus, dysentery and cholera that it is “deadlier than bullets.” Cried Dingell: “Human beings usually have 33 feet of guts, but I bet the man who made that decision doesn’t have three feet.”

Easy Prey. Forthwith Dingell introduced a bill making a Korean beer issue mandatory. Then the Blatz Brewing Co. of Milwaukee sent the Secretary of the Army a telegram offering 600,000 cans of beer absolutely free of charge. Not to be outdone, the Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co. offered several vatfuls of free beer, too. At that, Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, president of the W.C.T.U., rose in Denver before the 76th convention of her sisterhood to launch a heated counterattack.

One-half to two-thirds of the troops in the Army, said President Colvin, passed their rations on to “drunkards.” She intimated strongly that these lamentable souses, fairly gurgling with borrowed suds, would fall easy prey to a cruel enemy.

She further charged that the Army and the United States Brewers Foundation were engaged in a “brazen” plot to get intoxicants to soldiers, and demanded that everybody in authority in the U.S. keep a clear head by swearing off for the duration. She also suggested that Congress investigate the drinking habits of Alaskan Eskimos, on the ground that the corrosive effect of alcohol in the North fairly invited a Russian invasion.

Verbal Missiles. Caught in the middle, a harassed Pentagon spokesman quickly denied that 1) Washington had ordered a ban on beer, and 2) that it had ordered the ban to be lifted. It was, he said, all up to commanders in the field.

As all these verbal missiles arched across the Pacific, Army authorities in Tokyo finally hit on an uneasy compromise. The free-beer issue was restored with the provision that it would henceforth be purchased by post-exchange profits for front-line troops only, that rear-echelon servicemen would have to buy their own, and that soda pop would be offered to those who want it.

* A reaction slightly less violent than that of a Mrs. Agnes Denmandson of Seattle who protested the legalization of 3.2 beer in 1933 by proclaiming: “Anyone who will drink beer will commit murder.”