Words of the Week

Curran v. Caraway. Dry hands were laid roughly on the No. 1 Wet organization of the U. S. last week, pulling and tearing at its innards, dissecting its workings. The hands belonged to three members--Arkansas' Senator Caraway, Montana's Senator Walsh, Indiana's Senator Robinson--of the

Senate Lobby Committee, now engaged in investigating lobbying for and against Prohibition. The Wet organization on the operating table was the Association against the Prohibition Amendment, represented by its $25,000-per-year President Henry Hastings Curran, onetime (1923-1926) Immigration Commissioner at the Port of New York, onetime (1921) Republican candidate for Mayor of New York City. As the Lobby Committee is four-to-one Dry, it inquired into all the Association's doings, until lobbying was almost forgotten. Sarcasm, sneers, low comedy, abusive epithets and verbal horseplay featured the Committee's august deliberations.

Factual discoveries about the A. A. P. A. included the following: It claims 150,000 members, of whom about 5,000 are voluntary contributors to the Wet cause. Seven wealthy men, including three du Fonts, supply about 60% of the organization's budget. Last year A. A. P. A. spent $473-213; this year it hopes to raise $1,000,000 for the Congressional campaign. Its prime purpose is to elect Wet candidates to office. In 1928 it supported 19 nominees for the House, excluding sitting members. Two of its candidates were elected. It promotes such Wet rallies as the Black Duck mass meeting in Boston (TIME. Jan. 13), finances such Wet speakers as Maryland's Governor Ritchie. It largely stage-managed the Wet side of the House Judiciary Committee hearings by forehandedly arranging for the appearance as witnesses of such notables as William Wallace Atterbury and Pierre Samuel du Pont.

Mr. Curran, cocky and combative, refused to let his Dry inquisitors dismay him by their wilful interpretations of these facts. With redoubled pertness, he shot back at them: "The 18th Amendment will be repealed in about five years, I think. There are five sovereign States [New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, Montana, Nevada] now in revolt against this measure. . . . Three out of four Americans are in revolt. . . . This is the driest Congress we have ever had or ever will have. We have reached the bottom of the hill. The halcyon days of Prohibition are over. The tide is turning. ..."

Lobby Chairman Caraway twice tried to entrap Mr. Curran into statements which Drys might have effectively used against Wets throughout the land. Trap No. 1

Senator Caraway: Is the color line drawn in your association?

Mr. Curran: I never heard of it. Senator Caraway: The Negro is eligible to membership on your board? Mr. Curran: Certainly. Senator Caraway: Then you think he has as much right to get drunk as anybody else? I do, too!

Mr. Curran: You speak for yourself. Keep these words in your mouth. Don't put them in mine. Trap No. 2

Senator Caraway: You think it would justify them [the five States in "revolt" on Prohibition] to take up arms against the Government, do you not?

Mr. Curran: I hope that will never happen.

Senator Caraway: But if a resort to arms is necessary, you are in favor of it? Mr. Curran: I'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Senator Caraway: You won't be here when that bridge is reached.

The A. A. P. A.'s files were raked by the committee's investigators for hidden letters. Only one such letter was found that made headlines. It was written by Captain William H. Straton, founder and board chairman of the Association, to a vice president in Philadelphia and was labeled: "This is absolutely confidential." Excerpt:

"My own feeling is, as I talk to Senators, members of Congress and public officials, that Mr. Hoover is beginning to doubt whether Prohibition can be enforced. He wants to take plenty of time to consider it but he is being abused a little too much."

Perfidious Cannon? What really instigated the Lobby Committee's Prohibition investigation were the charges filed with it by Massachusetts Congressman George Holden Tinkham against the Anti-Saloon League, the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals and the political activities of Bishop James Cannon Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (TIME, April 7). Last week Representative Tinkham appeared before the committee, generalized about the "$67,565,312.72" the Anti-Saloon League had spent, vaguely deplored the failure of politico-religious campaigners to reveal their expenditures under the Corrupt Practice Act.

One specific charge Mr. Tinkham did make against Bishop Cannon. He developed the fact that according to a Senate investigation report in 1929 the largest single contributor to Herbert Hoover's campaign was Edwin Cornell Jameson of Manhattan who gave $172,000 to beat Democratic Nominee Smith. Mr. Jameson is president of Globe & Rutgers Fire Insurance Co., a director of many another insurance company and bank, and of American Smelting & Refining Co. According to his report to the Senate, he contributed $65,300 to Bishop Cannon to wage his successful war against Nominee Smith in Virginia. When the Bishop's Anti-Smith Committee of Virginia reported its political expenditures to the House it listed: "Received from James Cannon Jr., donation of E. C. Jameson of New York, $17,000." Declared Representative Tinkham: "On the face of the record, $48,300 came into the hands of Bishop Cannon for which he has rendered no account nor has anyone so far as I can find out."

In Manhattan Biggest Contributor Jameson, when questioned about these intricacies of political financing, revealed his amateur standing as a "fat cat" by insisting: "I have no idea what it's all about. I have no idea at all."

"Fair Field for Discussion." Many a citizen throughout the land has the notion that in some mystical way George Woodward Wickersham, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Commission, reflects the Prohibition views of President Hoover, that what he says about this issue can somehow be traced back to the White House. Whether Mr. Wickersham is a presidential mouthpiece on Prohibition or not, members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, assembled in Washington last week, heard him discuss the possibility of a change in the Dry law, in these words: "To secure the maximum abstinence from the use of liquor, it may be found desirable to modify the 18th Amendment or the national Prohibition laws. I express no opinion on that point. . . . That is a fair field for discussion. But I do appeal to you to aid in demonstrating that, so long as the law stands, no patriotic American should advocate flouting its provisions."

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