Cannon's Reward

On Feb. 14 a very determined little Virginian will board the White Star liner Calgaric bound for the Mediterranean, for the Holy Land. He will be dressed in the black cloth of the clergy. Undoubtedly newsphotographers will snap his picture, reporters take down his parting words. In one of his suitcases will be a parchment scroll hailing him as the most significant U. S. contributor to religious progress for 1928. He is Bishop James Cannon Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

The scroll has not yet been prepared. But it will be ready by Feb. 13, and then Bishop Cannon will receive it at a Manhattan dinner in his honor. It will be written by Editor Stanley Hoflund High of the Christian Herald, Protestant interdenominational weekly, circulation circa 230,000.

Editor High has hinted what the scroll will say. "It is not only because of Bishop Cannon's leadership but also because of the unselfishness of his leadership that the Christian Herald chose him for this honor. The wet interests reviled him. The wet press made him the brunt of its caricatures. But he never flinched. . . ."

Of course, Editor High referred to the acerbities which have greeted Bishop Cannon's militant Anti-Saloon League activities (see p. 12) and his leadership of the bitter anti-Smith campaign among Southern Democrats.

Readers of the Christian Herald were not surprised to learn that their weekly had chosen to honor Bishop Cannon. The Christian Herald, too, trains its cannons against the wets. It prints High-and-dry editorials such as the following: "The Christian Herald is in this Prohibition fight to the finish. . . . The minds of America's younger generation need to be carried back to pre-Prohibition days to insure that they will understand the transformation which the Eighteenth Amendment has wrought." Editor High pays $5 to anyone who will write a brief authentic article revealing the degradation of drunkenness, the benison of Prohibition.

In view of the Christian Herald's and Bishop Cannon's joint distaste for liquor, there seemed no doubt but that Bishop Cannon had been honored more for his anti-Prohibitionism than for his purely non-political Christian virtues and contributions.

Bishop Cannon is the first to receive the Christian Herald's award, which hereafter will be annual. Since the Christian Herald is the largest Protestant weekly in the U. S. its award is a matter of no small moment. In time, Editor High and Chain-Store Tycoon James Cash Penney, who is president of the Christian Herald Association, Inc., hope to have their award rated as a sort of Nobel prize for religion. Unlike the Nobel prizes, however, Christian Herald awards will go to none but U. S. citizens.

The contiguity of Tycoon Penney and President-Elect Hoover, who chose the Penney mansion at Miami for his pre-inaugural retreat, added an emphasis to the Cannon award. It was perhaps circumstantial, perhaps significant, that a close and potent friend of Mr. Hoover's should regard Dry fervor as religious service.

Mr. Penney's prohibitive fervor extends even to tobacco. He is one of the few U. S. employers who will discharge a helper for smoking a cigaret at his work.*

*But Mr. Penney's son James Cash Penney Jr. approves tobacco, of alcohol.