"An Open Mind"

"The Commission considers . . . enforcement in the country as a whole unsatisfactory. . . . The Commission by a large majority does not favor repeal of the 18th Amendment. . . . I am in accord with this view. I am in unity with the spirit of the report in seeking constructive steps to advance the national ideal of eradication of the social and economic and political evils of the [liquor] traffic . . . at the same time facing with an open mind the difficulties which have arisen under this experiment.

"I do, however, see serious objections to and therefore must not be understood as recommending the Commission's proposed revision of the 18th Amendment which is suggested by them for possible consideration at some future time if the continued effort at enforcement should not prove successful. My own duty is clear--to enforce the law with all the means at our disposal without equivocation or reservation. . . ."

That is what President Hoover said to Congress by way of comment on the Wickersham Prohibition Report (see p. 8).

"Hasty and inexact." That is what the potent, Wet, arch-Republican New York Herald-Tribune immediately said, among other disappointed things, of President Hoover's message to Congress. Many another influence close to the Administration was similarly chagrinned.

The country, already badly befuddled by the Commission's contradictions, wondered what this new contradiction might mean. While emphasizing that his Commission did not favor repeal, the President had played down the fact that a majority of his Commission favored immediate revision. In emphatically repudiating his Commission's suggested method for revision and in the same breath rehearsing his "own duty" to enforce the law "without equivocation or reservation," he had apparently slammed the revision door shut in his Commission's face. The Commission had reported Wet. The President had plumped Dry--more squarely than he ever plumped since entering politics. What did it all mean?

Wet Republicans were specially anxious for an answer. So to the White House was summoned big, blond Theodore Clifford Wallen, Washington correspondent of the Herald Tribune. The President talked to Correspondent Wallen privately. Next day the Herald Tribune carried a hesitant story to the effect that the President had "turned thumbs down only on the specific plan of revision suggested by the Commission," that he was still open-minded on other proposals. The White House endeavor to make President Hoover seem less Dry was carried further when Secretary Walter Newton assembled newsmen and solemnly explained--anonymously--that the President had been "misrepresented," that the door was not closed to other Wet ideas. Joining in the effort to "explain" the President's position was his good friend, Journalist Mark Sullivan, who wrote this asininity: "A [President] cannot well be in a position of enforcing an existing law with one hand while with the other hand he gives public consideration to a change in the law."

It was the second important time in three years that Herbert Hoover had seemed to shout Dry and whisper Wet on Prohibition. Historians recalled that confidential explanations were found necessary after the famed "experiment-noble-in-motive" speech at Palo Alto. It was hastily explained then that Nominee Hoover's attitude was "laboratory."

Members of Mr. Hoover's entourage had again to regret that the country was too dull-witted to understand Herbert Hoover, or that he was not sufficiently articulate to make himself clear at the first try. Practical politicians, on the other hand, regretted that Mr. Hoover had not recognized in the Report a beautiful magic carpet for 1932; that he had first nailed it down Dry so that it could not fly, then damaged it more by trying to pull out his nails.

While rumors ran around the White House lobbies that the President would make yet another statement of his attitude on the Wickershambles, men who know him well endeavored to make everything plain by brushing aside Politics, brushing aside Wetness and Dryness, and talking about Herbert Hoover's Idealism.

This quality, elusive but strongly apparent to any one who has talked with Herbert Hoover for five minutes, or read him on the subject of Child Welfare, or fairly compared his career before and after he left engineering, is described in relation to Prohibition as follows: All his mature life until the War he had the Continental attitude toward intoxicants--enjoyed them, knew how to handle them, seldom gave them a thought. When the U. S. adopted Prohibition, he stopped using alcohol. He was not particularly glad to do so.* But he was going into public life, wanted a clear record, and was ready to believe that abolition of alcohol would make for social uplift. The slow arrival of that uplift has not discouraged Idealist Hoover about its ultimate arrival. The sharp swing of public sentiment away from the present law challenges his stubborn nature, for he holds mass thought in low esteem. Even his political ambition is part of this attitude, his Quaker conscience telling him he must continue in his position, cost what pain it may, for the ultimate public good.

Friends pointed over & again to a paragraph from a recent Satevepost article by Will Irwin, the man who is supposed to know Herbert Hoover best of all. The paragraph:

"In all the hammering of the past months, not even the bitterest opponent has belittled the Hoover mind. The intellectual stature of him is too patent. . . . It is wide thinking, it is fast, it is intuitive, it is as accurate as a die, it is flexible, it is creative."

*There is a story that he hopped with vexation upon receiving, in Poland, a letter from Mrs. Hoover from California saying that out of respect for the new Prohibition law, she had taken a lot of wines given them by Stanford University and poured them away in the garden.

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