Venture Into Pedagogy

How much has the property once occupied by McGovern's saloon on Main Street increased in value since Prohibition?

Interview your grandmother on the results of the Eighteenth Amendment and write a 100-word theme on the benefits of Prohibition.

Write six Dry mottoes. (Samples: "Let us use alcohol, not waste it." "Law makers must not be lawbreakers." "The Eighteenth Amendment stands for better 'boys and better business." "Is Prohibition a success? Ask the bankers. Ask the Salvation Army. Ask the social workers. Ask the mothers. ASK EVERYBODY!")

Write an essay on what brought about the Eighteenth Amendment, explaining its difference from previous amendments.

Study your local newspaper. Has it a Wet bias? Is it friendly or antagonistic to the Eighteenth Amendment?

Such were the problems and exercises suggested last week by the U. S. Prohibition Bureau in a broad plan for teaching school children throughout the land "the facts of Prohibition." To collect and disseminate "the facts" Congress had appropriated $50,000. To Miss Anna B. Sutter, Chief of the Prohibition Bureau's Division of Statistics and Education, fell this money and she it was who prepared a course of Prohibition instruction to be placed in all schools. Much to Miss Sutler's chagrin the Government's venture into pedagogy was short-lived.

Miss Sutter, now 35, was once a Pennsylvania school teacher.* She entered the Prohibition Bureau in 1922 when Roy Asa Haynes, a "loan" from the Anti-Saloon League, was its director. Mr. Haynes. zealot, yearned to-"sell" Prohibition to the country by direct advertising, by special school courses. Miss Sutter shared his ardor but it was not until this year that Congress supplied wherewithal for the experiment. She had prepared a mass of Dry material which she was to take to the National Education Association's meeting last week in Atlanta when, a little prematurely, she revealed her purpose.

One Sutter pamphlet was labeled: How shall we teach the Eighteenth Amendment? The Government's message to you. It began: "You realize a great difference for what . . . we will call 'temperance' teaching. . . . The Government needs the help and cooperation of every teacher from Maine to California ... in developing a consciousness of the proper attitude toward this law. . . ."

The second tract, called The Eighteenth Amendment: A message to young people, began: "Our country needs young people who understand the Eighteenth Amendment and its workings . . . young people whose opinions are so well grounded in fact that they will not be easily misled by false or one-sided arguments."

Great was the uproar in Washington when it was found that the Prohibition Unit was preparing to inject the Sutter pamphlets into the U. S. school system. Miss Sutter, promptly silenced, refused to see swarms of press interviewers. Commissioner James M. Doran hurried back to headquarters, conferred anxiously with Undersecretary of the Treasury Mills and Assistant Secretary Lowman. They declared the country had "the wrong impression" of the Bureau's purpose, that nothing would be "forced upon" the schools. The Sutter pamphlets were withdrawn from circulation, locked in a vault, made ready for incineration. President Hoover himself was credited with knocking the Sutter plan out of existence.

Out of Washington spread a widely-printed report that Assistant Secretary Lowman, in charge of Prohibition, had been asked by President Hoover to resign; and that Prohibition Commissioner Doran was to be returned to his test tubes and retorts as a government chemist. "A dream," said Mr. Lowman. The White House said the same, but predicted a long period of quiet in the Prohibition Bureau.

Miss Sutter went to Atlanta, attended the N. E. A. convention. She sat silently in a booth, ready to answer teachers' questions obliquely, passing out no pamphlets, no tracts, no suggested study courses.

*She is no kin to the late romantic John Augustus Sutter, tragic figure of California's gold rush who, after possessing a demesne of many hundreds of square miles, died a pauper in Washington.