Key to Hell

Breaths were bated in the South last week. In Atlanta, the Imps of Hell had dug a Pit. Mayor James Lee Key was an Imp. In Nashville, Dr. Edwin Frederick Vogelpohl, member of the church council of the First Lutheran Church, was not only an Imp but the first president of the Imps of Hell, Inc.

After the American Legion convention in Detroit last month (TIME, Sept. 28, Oct. 5), Dr. Clarence True Wilson, goateed general secretary of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals, made speeches in St. Joseph and Kansas City, Mo. Said he: "Legion conventions are planned ahead of time as drunken orgies in defiance of the laws the men as soldiers had taken an oath of allegiance to support. . . . The ex-soldier who will [disobey the law], and practically all of them did in Detroit, is a perjured scoundrel who ought not to represent the decency of the flag under which he fought. . . . There was a marked absence of the sober, well-behaved typical American. The other crowd is in power. That is why such numbers of staggering drunks disgraced the uniform and yelled for beer."* Dr. Wilson later said he had been misunderstood. All he meant was that some of the Legionaries had "dropped their Americanism, their Christian standards of decency, dropped into French customs and came back to import them into the United States." Nevertheless, officers of the Legion, feeling particularly insulted by the expression "staggering drunks," roared at Dr. Wilson. Besides attacking the American Legion in Kansas City, Dr. Wilson took pot shots at the late Dwight Whitney Morrow, John Jacob Raskob and Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick. Defending Bishop James Cannon Jr., he said: "He saved $3,000 and placed it in a savings bank where it was drawing 3% interest when Wall Street men of Jewish persuasion argued him into investing it where they said he could get 10%. He was guilty only of being foolish. The attacks on him are sponsored by the imps of Hell."

To Brown Turner, copyreader on the Nashville Tennesseean, came an idea. Imps of Hell? It was a good name. With other local Legionaries he formed an organization for ''public worship, education and literary undertaking . . . separation of Church and State . . . temperance through the modification of the Volstead Act." He became secretary. Elected president was Lutheran Dr. Vogelpohl. 37, dentist, vice president of the Tennessee Dental Association, onetime commander of Nashville Pos; No. 5 of the American Legion. Headquarters were set up in the Bennie Dillon Building in Nashville. Welcoming male & female voters, the Imps set out to enroll 2,000 people last week. From 26 cities came requests for permission to open "Pits."

Two persons whose names would give the Imps prominence (perhaps not authority) are Manhattan's Mayor James John Walker and California's Will Rogers. To these went telegrams offering Impship. To a third, Mayor Key of Atlanta, went also a telegram which received a prompt answer: Yes.

Back from junketing with 23 other U. S. mayors in Europe (TIME, May 25, June 8), tall, Lincolnian Mayor Key had found Atlanta greatly upset over his statement that "in the U. S., Prohibition is a failure." Local Prohibition groups were wroth. Rev. Robert Z. Tyler of Grace Methodist Church asked Mayor Key to resign as teacher of the James L. Key Bible Class which he founded nine years ago (TIME, Sept. 28). Vowing that "there are not enough Methodist preachers in the world to bridle me," Mayor Key promptly formed a non-sectarian Bible Class of his own. Last fortnight he smiled his puckery smile, said he was happy in his new freedom "and the fact that we will not be dictated to by any pickle-headed pastor." Also, he was happy when a count was made of Sunday attendances: to his new class had come 1.019 people of all denominations (Jews included), more than twice the number in any other Sunday school class in Atlanta. Prohibition was not discussed in the first meeting. The social service work sponsored by Mayor Key's original class was to be carried on. "Disentangled, free," said he, "we hope to revolutionize the Christian spirit of this town."

Readily agreeing last week to be an Imp of Hell, Mayor Key wrote the Nashville Pit that it was "seizing upon this term of vulgar abuse and wearing it as a badge of honor. The people of the United States have observed with amazement and resentment the abuse and denunciation heaped upon the heads of the American Legion for their patriotic stand upon the Prohibition question. The men who obeyed the call of their country to arms . . . should not have heaped upon their heads the abuse of ecclesiastical and other mountebanks who were skulking in the rear when the time of test and trial came."

*For another account of the Legion's Detroit convention, see p. 28.

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