Trail's End

At Otter Tail Lake in the State of Minnesota, Death came accidentally one night last week to the Rev. Ole John Kvale./- He went to bed all alone in his summer cottage, "Trail's End." All night he was alone. Sometime in the hours of darkness, tongues of flames (perhaps from the gasoline lamp) lapped the cottage and consumed it. In the morning a man, coming to rent land, found the charred skeleton of a building, and upon what had been a sleeping porch, beside what had been a cot, a body.

So at 3:55 p. m. one workday afternoon the U. S. Senate took a recess until the next morning. The conflagration which had destroyed "Trail's End" had also wiped out the Farmer-Labor Party in the House of Representatives. For Mr. Kvale was not only a minister of the Lutheran Gospel but a member of Congress. He was the Congressman who reached Washington by defeating the once-famed Andrew John Volstead for reelection.

In 1920 Mr. Kvale faced Mr. Volstead in the Republican primaries and won, but in so doing he called Mr. Volstead an Atheist. Mr. Volstead went to court. His daughter Laura testified that he was "a good Christian man, a good father," and the judge ordered Mr. Kvale removed from the Republican ticket. He ran as an independent and lost to Volstead by only 1,200 votes in the Harding landslide. Two years later Kvale as a Farmer-Laborite opposed Volstead again. In that campaign Mr. Volstead was known as a disinterested Dry, Mr. Kvale as a red-hot Dry. Kvale won, by 14,000 votes. Volstead became legal adviser of the Northwest Prohibition District.

Prohibitionist though he was, Kvale not only called the Volstead Act "the greatest tragedy ever witnessed by civilization," but denounced Anti-Saloon Leaguers as "cheap ward politicians wearing the mask of Prohibition." He condemned Prohibition agents who hastily shot down a Minnesotan suspected "of being a bootlegger." (TIME, June 24).

Last week Mr. Volstead, asked whether he would run for Congress again, made answer: "This is a sad time to talk politics but . . . it would be difficult for me to refuse."

* Simultaneous with England's centenary of toleration towards Catholics (see p. 52) all Baltimore's fraternal organizations except the Ku Klux Klan, warned by bicentenary good-feeling, formed a permanent non-sectarian body which they promised to make worldwide.

/- Pronounced "Quail."