Religion: Little Giant

By virtue of being superintendent of the International Reform Federation with offices at Washington, portly, white-crowned Dr. William Sheafe Chase, canon of the Episcopal Church, has for the past ten years been the ex officio No. 1 U. S. Reformer. Having devoted a lifetime to denouncing vice and lobbying for purity, 79-year-old Canon Chase last week retired. Into the superintendency and the Washington office, where U. S. vices are alphabetically cataloged beginning with Billiards and ending with Theatre, stepped a seasoned reformer named Clinton Norman Howard, 68. He announced that the Federation, endowed with $250,000, would bend its efforts chiefly toward Peace and Prohibition.

For more than half a century Reformer Howard has battled drink. At 13 he asked Governor Beaver of Pennsylvania, his native state, if something could not be done about it, was appointed a page in the Legislature for his pains. Clinton Howard became a picture-frame salesman, acquired a modest fortune, moved to Rochester, X. Y., whence for a generation he has periodically emerged to go on lecture tours.

Small, fiery, once given to soup-bowl haircuts and dark Quaker garments, he has been called “the Little Giant” for his resemblance to Orator Stephen A. Douglas.

Orator Howard is credited with having written many a florid passage in the sermons of the late “Billy” Sunday, orated himself like this: “The speakeasy is the most stupendous, titanic, colossal, calamitous, crimson, conscienceless, pitiless and cataclysmic criminal of the ages. It is the vilest of villains, the cruelest of all criminals, the loudest of all liars, the blackest of all blackguards, the most treasonable of all traitors, the most terrible of all tyrants since the world was born.” In Rochester alone Reformer Howard delivered 3.500 speeches and sermons, boasted that he accepted pay for but one. With the proceeds from that he conducted a successful campaign, invading a neighboring county to help defeat Wet James Wolcott Wadsworth for the U. S. Senate in 1926.

Depression, by giving people other things to worry about, cut into the reformers’ trade. While it is not impossible that U. S. opinion may some day be steered into rethinking its attitude on liquor, oratorical prohibitionists today find it hard to make themselves heard. In the big house in Rochester where Clinton Howard has been living alone without servants, he conceded last week that no other outstanding reformers of his kind are now at work in the U. S.