Times & Places

Robert Beecher Howell, Nebraska's pince-nezzed junior Senator, continued last week as Prohibition's bravest champion. Having complained that the District of Columbia is a pretty wet spot which the President of the U. S., as chief District officer, might easily dry, up and having elicited a White House statement ("The President is glad the Senator has raised the question") asking for specific charges (TIME, Sept. 30). Senator Howell arose again and said: ''It seems to me that the President was a little unfair . . . to call upon me 'to state definite facts, with time and place.' . . . I have not come in contact with a bootlegger. I am not familiar with their practices."

The Senator was able and willing, however, to repeat "what is common knowledge." He read into the record a Chicago Tribune story of last year about Washington's "happy, happy drinkers" and free flowing "joy-water." He read the officially reported adventures of four Prohibition agents at the Carlton Club one January night two years ago. The agents said they stayed in the club, which has not yet been raided, from 11 p. m. to 2:35 a. m. "People do not usually remain up until 3 and 3:30 in the morning dancing at these clubs," deduced Senator Howell, "unless they are animated by something more than natural animal spirits." Moreover, the agents saw liquor, bought liquor, drank liquor. One of the agents was subsequently approached by the manager of the Wardman Park Hotel (affiliated with the Carlton Club), who protested that high Dry officials were his good friends, including Brig.-Gen. Lincoln Clark Andrews, then Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition.

At this point Senator Howell's revelations were interrupted and the bright torch of Prohibition passed into the rugged hand of Iowa's Smith Wildman Brookhart. Utah's lank Smoot was on the point of defending the Prohibition corps when Senator Brookhart suddenly interjected: "I should like to ask the Senator from Utah if he ever saw any signs of bootleggers around any Wall Street conventions at any of the hotels here in Washington."

Senator Smoot looked blank. "What does the Senator mean?"

Brookhart: ". . . Dinners given by Wall Street gentlemen for the purpose of greeting newly elected Senators."

Smoot: "I will say to the Senator I have not. . . . I will ask the Senator to what place he refers."

Senator Brookhart proceeded to describe a dinner at the Willard Hotel given by one Walter J. Fahey, Manhattan broker, in 1927.

Smoot: I was not there.

Brookhart: Oh yes, the Senator was there.

Smoot: I do not recall it.

Brookhart: I saw the Senator there. . . . The flasks, as I remember, were under the table and all one had to do was to reach down and get his flask and put it in his hip pocket. The Senator did not do that. I know. He told me he did not.

Smoot: I cannot call to mind the occasion. . . .

Thus were illustrated on the Senate floor two predominant Dry attitudes toward Prohibition: the Dry who considers it his duty to tell all he sees; the Dry whose social sensibility keeps him silent. Senator Brookhart was variously hailed throughout the land as one who (although two years late) had done a civic service, or as one who had accepted hospitality and then flouted its rules. Senator Smoot, similarly, was viewed either as a dry-voting hypocrite who had kept mum, or as a gentleman who had not gone out of his way to impose his public character on a private party he "cannot call to mind."

The Smoot attitude seemed to many an observer to coincide remarkably with President Hoover's. Only the President's bitterest critics credit him with having been simple-minded or stubborn enough not to realize that Washington, with wet Maryland adjacent and the broad Potomac handy, is one of the easiest places in the U. S. to buy liquor. And only the fanatically Dry have failed to appreciate the sense of the Hoover policy on Prohibition, sharply announced soon after Inauguration (TIME, March 11). The gist of that policy was: "No more crusades."

Responsible for Prohibition prosecutions in the District of Columbia is District Attorney Leo A. Rover. Part of the Brookhart outburst was an offer to tell Mr. Rover, before a grand jury, all that Senator Brookhart knows or has heard about Wet Washington. Mr. Rover called at the Prohibition Bureau to see if there was sufficient evidence to warrant grand jury procedure. Mr. Rover said he would be "very glad" to have Senator Brookhart testify, but with everyone bearing in mind the motto "No more crusades," it seemed certain no great amount of evidence would be found, that any steps toward making Washington the "model" promised by President Hoover, would be quietly taken.

Responsible for the collection of liquor evidence in the District are Proctor L. Dougherty, District Commissioner, and William Delanford, deputy Prohibition Administrator under Federal Commissioner James M. Doran.