National Affairs: Worker Willebrandt

“Food won the war; but it means getting loyalty and co-operation from every kitchen. . . .

“Do you remember meatless days? So, too, we can have cocktail-less parties. You may say that was war-time sacrifice, and the average citizen won’t sacrifice his desires in peace times. Of course, peace patriotism is harder, but it is not impossible.

“Herbert Hoover carries no timidity of defeat in his heart. He has the amazing spiritual leadership to make each law-abiding household want to do its bit. Governor Smith says it can’t be done. With Herbert Hoover we know it CAN be done!”

Thus, a third time, did Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney-General of the U. S., do-her-bit for Hooverism before an audience of Ohio Protestants. The evening after delivering her message to the Methodists at Lorain (TIME, Oct. 1), she visited a Presbyterian men’s club at Warren. A long quotation about Tammany Hall corruption a generation ago was part of the speech. She had looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She cried:

“Of course, Tammany’s Governor may be equal to the task of reforming Tammany, but I want to say far above a whisper that I doubt it!”

It was very effective speech-making and most of the Presbyterian gentlemen of Warren, Ohio, went home shaking their heads about cocktails and parties and Tammany and all the rest.

But there were frowns and scowls and even growls among the “practical” element of the G. O. P. Senator Moses, himself no scorner of cocktails, said he had received “plenty” of letters protesting about Worker Willebrandt. The arch-Democratic New York World turned, of course, from anger to glee and redoubled its editorial sniping at “Mabel” and “sectarianism.” More serious was a cartoon published broadcast by the pro-Hoover Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, showing a church daubed with “Politix” and the G. O. P. spanking a naughty child. The caption was “Give this little girl a great big hand!”

In wet Cleveland, National Committeeman Maurice Maschke said she was “misguided.” In wet New Jersey, Senator Walter Evans Edge assured the public that Mrs. Willebrandt would make no visit there. From wet Wisconsin to wet headquarters in wet Chicago went a letter from Benjamin Fuelleman, a State committeeman. “Unless Mrs. Willebrandt is muzzled,” wrote Mr. Fuelleman, “Mr. Hoover is sure to go down to defeat. … If she fails to do this [return to Washington, be silent], President Coolidge should call for her resignation. . . . We cannot do it if we have to carry around ‘an old man of the sea’ such as Mrs. Willebrandt has proven herself.”

Walter Jodok Kohler, the G. O. P.’s gubernatorial nominee in Wisconsin, sped to Washington to see Nominee Hoover. What he said about Mrs. Willebrandt was not revealed. Newsgatherers plagued Dr. Hubert Work, the G. 0. P.’s chief spokesman. This colloquy ensued.

Q. What is Mrs. Willebrandt’s status?…

Dr. Work (raising his hands): I don’t know. She is a sort of free lance. . . .

Q. Do you approve of the speeches she has made?

Dr. W. . . . I have not read them all and so I cannot answer.

Q. You will find them very interesting.

Dr. W. Well, it will have to wait until the campaign is over.

Two days later, quizzed again on the Willebrandt matter as he emerged from Nominee Hoover’s office, Dr. Work said: “I am chairman of the Republican National Committee and I have conferences every day with Mr. Hoover.”

In Chicago, which seemed to be Mrs. Willebrandt’s base of operations, the subject grew exciting when she appeared in town and registered at the Blackstone Hotel. She would see no one, until after a two-hour conference with James William Good, Hooverizer of the West, and Walter Newton, Chairman of the G. O. P. Speaker’s Bureau. Emerging she was asked point-blank what her auspices were.

Turning, she said: “I think that I will let Mr. Newton answer that for me.”

Mr. Newton squared off and replied: “Mrs. Willebrandt certainly has been speaking under the auspices of the Speaker’s Bureau of the Republican National Committee.”

So that settled that. In Washington, Nominee Hoover repeated to the newsmen that he “would rather not discuss” the matter at all. A Southern speaking tour was arranged for Mrs. Willebrandt, on Nominee Hoover’s heels through Tennessee later this month. She was also scheduled to speak next week at a State convention of the W. C. T. U. in Kokomo, Ind. Mrs. Willebrandt returned to her duties as Assistant Attorney General in special charge of Volstead violations. While she deplored the position she found herself in, she said: “I suppose it is inevitable. I am sort of a personification of Prohibition.”

Mrs. Willebrandt was not alone in the public eye. Newshawks penetrated to the village of Lomita, suburb of Los Angeles, to interview and photograph a schoolteacher named Arthur F. Willebrandt, 40 years old, with a pompadour. Court records show that Arthur F. Willebrandt divorced “M. Elizabeth Willebrandt” in 1925. The disguised name was Mrs. Willebrandt’s idea. Mr. Willebrandt’s grounds were amicable. He charged desertion after they had been separated some eight years. She did not contest the suit.

In 1910, Arthur F. Willebrandt was superintendent of a high school in Buckley, Mich. Mabel Elizabeth Walker was a girl of 21, teaching lumberjacks’ children in the Buckley primary school. She had gone to Michigan with her parents from Kansas, where she was born in a sod hut on the prairie.

Soon after the wedding, Mr. Willebrandt’s lungs necessitated a move to Arizona. Mrs. Willebrandt nursed him and did all the housework. She had vitality enough left over to take a normal school course in Tempe. After his health returned, she left him. She became a school superintendent in Los Angeles and studied law at the University of Southern California. Her reputation grew with her work as Public Defender of Los Angeles—charity advocate for beaten wives and fallen women.

In 1921, scouring the country for a woman lawyer to put into his sub-Cabinet, President Harding heard about Mrs. Willebrandt in such glowing terms as only California’s Senator Hiram Johnson knows how to use. President Harding feared she was “too young” (32 years) but appointed her.

Her warmest ambition is to return to a Federal judgeship in California. If Nominee Hoover is elected, she may get the appointment. That the Senate would confirm her is less certain, in fact most doubtful. In her pursuit and presentation of “the moral issue,” she has been as hard on Congressmen as on the rest. Her lack of sympathy for the politics of Prohibition embarrassed the G. O. P. in the 1924 campaign. Now she is “the personification of Prohibition.” Few Senators are sufficiently “noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose” to approve putting Mrs. Willebrandt on a bench of justice.