Under Way

General Lincoln C. Andrews, returning from his "125% successful" conference with Britishers on smuggling prevention, sat in the dining salon of the liner La France, ate crepes suzettes (French pancakes) with rum sauce. Novelist Edna Ferber (see p. 31) and Lawyer Dudley Field Malone spoofed him. He replied that "everything eaten with a fork or a spoon was quite all right."

Later he was hurried ashore by a U. S. Coast Guard cutter. Reporters boxed him, asked him if he really intended to resign as chief of prohibition enforcement. Said he: "You asked me that last November, and I told you that if I had shown no progress in a year I would quit. Well, I am sticking to that."

Reporters: "Do you consider that you have shown progress?"

General Andrews: "I think we are damn well under way."

Meanwhile, the Government and the learned bootlegger waged chemical warfare, the one trying to denature industrial alcohol, the other trying to renature it for beverage purposes. The story, play by play:

1) The bootleggers found the substances of Government-denaturing-formu1ae No. 6 and No. 7 easily removable.

2) Acting Secretary of the Treasury Winston ordered that one-half gallon of "approved gasoline" be put in every 100 gallons of industrial alcohol.

3) Vigilant Wets howled about a Government which tried to poison its drinkers. Said the New York World: "Jonathan Swift had much the same idea of a short cut to the solution of a vexatious problem when he wrote his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country. Swift's proposal was to fatten the children and then eat them. Swift wrote in irony. The Prohibition Bureau is in earnest. The goal of its research is a poison which will kill."

4) General Andrews on arrival in Manhattan, said: "Our chemists are not seeking more deadly poisons, as has been published, but merely something that the bootlegger can't take out of alcohol as he has learned to remove most of the poisons from the old denaturing formulae. They are seeking something which the ultimate consumer of the beverage will readily recognize from its odor and taste, so that he will know instantly that he is in possession of denatured alcohol."