PROHIBITION: The G. O. P. Divides

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Zeus may well have been thinking of something else when Pallas Athene, mature and fully armed, was born from his ponderous brow. Certainly when Chairman Simeon Davison Fess of the Republican National Committee thought and said: "The party will remain Dry or it will be split" (TIME, Nov. 17) he was not contemplating the creation of a mature, warlike body of Wet Republicans which almost simultaneously appeared. Perhaps instead Mr. Fess was thinking in terms of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals statement fortnight ago: "Any catering to the Wets, any toleration of a suggestion of modification, would light fires of bitter resentment in the hearts of the men and women who trooped to the polls ... in 1928."

Onetime Senator James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. of New York was the plume in the Wet Athene's helmet last week. He cried: "Senator Fess . . . cannot see what is going on in this country. Tears dim his sight. . . . Does the Senator think we can carry Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois and a half-dozen other States whose people spoke last week on this question . . . [and] hope to cajole repeal-Republicans, millions of good men & women, into an attitude of complacency concerning the thing they regard as vital?"

President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, for years the man who has written Wet planks for the Republican platform and for years seen them thrown out, declared: "Senator Fess . . . adds that 'if the Republican party stands for repeal, it might as well say good-day.' . . . My reply is that if the Republican party does not stand for repeal it might as well say goodnight. . . . The elections of November 1930 are the handwriting on the wall."

Representatives Fred Albert Britten of Illinois and Leonidas Carstarphen Dyer of Missouri also cried out against Mr. Fess's leadership. The Wet Republican press re acted even more sharply, and certain arch-Republican editors captioned editorials FESS OUGHT TO GO and THE BLIND SENATOR FROM OHIO. Hearst papers quoted an unnamed Republican leader as saying: "If this split continues there will be a Nationalist party in 1932."

Fuss-budgety Senator Fess seemed embarrassed. After taking time to discuss and think over his statement, he last week told newsgatherers that he had made it as an individual, not as party spokesman. He said also that his mind was open to modification recommendations from the Wickersham Commission. But he did not retract his theory that the party must not weasel on Prohibition, that it must be Dry.