PROHIBITION: To Make a Better Country

“To Make a Better Country”

On the slope of Capitol Hill, in neat position to help the U. S. government function, lives the Anti-Saloon League of America. Its building is of humble brick, painted a bellicose red. Upon its windows in large gold letters is painted the name: “Wayne B. Wheeler.”

Wayne B. Wheeler is dead. People said that the brains of the Anti-Saloon League died with him last September. Whether that is true or not, the League has not been the same since. Last week, when its bigwigs met in Washington, they could scarcely decide whether to continue the Rev. Dr. Francis Scott McBride as Mr. Wheeler’s heir to the title of Superintendent or to substitute Dr. Ernest Hurst Cherrington, who for many a year has been the League’s business manager and publisher at Prohibition’s birthplace in Westerville, Ohio.

Rev. Dr. McBride represents the Wheeler tradition of alert, energetic lobbying, vote-swaying, political-threatening. Mr. Cherrington represents a faction of the League which conceives that Wheelerism has been misunderstood in the U. S.; that the League’s moneyed lobbying has made the League almost unpopular; that the League’s wisest course now is to spend its millions after the fashion of manufacturers of tomato soup and cigarets, on national advertising and an “educational” campaign.

Last week, the League bigwigs compromised. They continued Dr. McBride as Superintendent. Promptly U. S. politicians were warned that only Drys need hope to have Anti-Saloon League money spent on their campaigns. For Mr. Cherrington, the bigwigs created the post of “Director of Publicity, Education and Research.”

Response to the League’s new department of moderation was quick— so quick that some observers imagined the bigwigs had known in advance what would happen. To the League came Sebastian Spering Kresge (5¢ & 10¢ stores) of Detroit and Manhattan, long a League admirer, and declared that $500,000 of a 25 million-dollar charity fund which he lately set aside, was at Publicist Cherrington’s disposal for 1928. The League had said that it wanted a million for 1928. Mr. Kresge promised to get the rest at once from fellow businessmen. Within 20 minutes of the opening of the League’s campaign for “education” funds, subscriptions totalled $650,000.

Why did Sebastian Spering Kresge think Prohibition worth $500,000 in one lump? Cynics might suspect that it was because people who spend dimes and nickels in saloons are more likely to spend them in nickel-&-dime stores if there are no saloons.*

Mr. Kresge however, stated other reasons. “I gave it,” he said, “because I believe the work of the League is going to make a better country. If the so-called good people of this country will stop drinking, the bootlegger, the rumrunner and corollary evils will disappear. . . .

“Young people of today have not completely rid themselves of the belief that drinking is smart or cute. Our campaign will show them that this belief is erroneous. . . .

“Why, if a man wants to lead a girl astray, he tries to get liquor into her so that she loses her senses and self-respect.”

Said Hearst-Colyumist Arthur Brisbane about Sebastian Spering Kresge’s gift:

“Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence would have given the $500,000 to establish breweries and plant vineyards for production of light wine and beer. He believed that would conquer whiskey, which, he said, killed half the population in his day and ruined their families. It wasn’t as bad as bootleg whiskey and killed slowly, if surely.”

* The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment pointed out that Mr. Kresge’s stores sell wine kegs, wine presses, decanters, cocktail shakers and glasses, bottling and corking machines.