National Affairs: Potent Son

The preliminaries of a murder trial began last week in Cincinnati. For George Remus, once potent bootleg boss, later a convict, they were poison. They had shot dead his wife, Emogene, in a public park. Now he had to produce evidence that it was not first-degree murder. He sought to take depositions from 75 witnesses in various cities— including Attorney General Sargent and Roy A. Haynes— to show that he had killed to elude a plot against his own life and property. For another man, ‘Legger Remus preliminaries were meat. He, Charles Phelps Taft II, lanky, a son of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, nephew and namesake of the publisher of the Cincinnati Times-Star, outstanding member of an outstanding college class*, found in the Remus case his first opportunity to function with public importance. As prosecuting attorney of Hamilton county, Ohio, an office he attained last January, he began making meat out of poison by forcing ‘Legger Remus to show how his proposed imported testimony would be relevant.

*Yale 1918. Other members of the class: Assistant Secretary of War F. Trubee Davison, Ohio State Senator John Martin Vorys (son of William Howard Taft’s political sponsor, Arthur Isaiah Vorys), Playwright Philip J. Q. Barry (You and I, In a Garden, etc.), Book Critic John Chipman Farrar, Novelist Wilmarth S. Lewis (See MILESTONES, p. 24), Chevalier Artemus L. Gates of the Legion of Honor, Newell Garfield (presidential grandson), Arthur Yales (gargantuan golfer).