POLITICAL NOTES: At the Mayflower

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The Democratic national pot came to a brief hard boil in the ornate dining room of Washington's fashionable Mayflower Hotel one day last week. Then it settled down to a long sullen simmer. The fire under the pot was, as usual, Prohibition.

The occasion was a special meeting of the Democratic National Committee called by its energetic little chairman, John Jacob Raskob. A foreknowledge that he, a Wet, would bring up Prohibition as a party matter had provoked preliminary wails of warning from Southern Drys, which helped only to advertise the gathering. The certain prospect of the kind of intraparty fight that only Democrats can stage drew throngs of spectators to the assembly. Senators, Representatives, National Committee members milled about in open anxiety. From the wall fell the stern gaze of Thomas Jefferson.

After a routine morning session, Chairman Raskob, nervous, diffident, arose to read an hour-long address on party policy. He licked his lips, gulped, mispronounced words. Predicting that Prohibition would be an "outstanding issue" in the next campaign he declared: "My recommendation is that the 18th Amendment be not repealed but that the Democratic party advocate a new amendment which will provide that nothing in the 18th Amendment shall prevent any State from directing and controlling absolutely the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors within its borders. . . . This plan prevents the return of the saloon. . . . In order that the Democratic party will not be called 'Wet' or 'Dry' I should like to christen this plan as the 'home-rule plan' because it is neither a Wet nor a Dry plan but a plan under which the people, through their respective States, may exercise the right of self-determination."

This proposal started the Democratic pot boiling. Drys thought their chairman was using his high office to crystallize Wet sentiment against them, to pledge the Democracy against Prohibition long in advance of the national convention. Tennessee's Dry Senator Cordell Hull began the pleading: "My God! The Democratic party has never had such an opportunity. Why take a lantern and search out something on which we can divide? Let us leave this question alone."

The Hull speech was too tame, too polite a protest for Arkansas' barrel-chested, full-blooded Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson. His face as red as his necktie, he leaped to the platform, began an address of his own. He waved his arms, shook his fists at Chairman Raskob. He thundered and bellowed. He worked himself up into a passion of dissent. Cried he:

"A crisis has been needlessly and unwisely precipitated. . . . You cannot write on the banner of the Democratic party the skull and crossbones of an outlaw trade. . . . The only way the Republican party can hope for victory is to rely on the lack of wisdom of those who lead the Democratic party. . . . I repudiate the effort of the national chairman to submerge all other issues and bring most prominently to the front one about which he knows the Democrats entertain conflicting opinions. . . . This act was in bad taste . . . not calculated to promote harmony. . . ."