Evening Star Newspaper, May 21, 1937, Page 11

‘Federal’ Rum THE EVEN NG STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FRIDAY THE opinions of the writers on this page are their own, not MAY 21, 1937, A1l [Foderal’ Rum|| News Behind the News |[T%zrmsraemsrtez | This Changing World | [Fleadine Folk] Told to Abide By Rules F. A. C. A. Acts, But Sponsorship Still Remains. BY DAVID LAWRENCE. HE Federal Alcohol Control Administration has let it be known that it is playing no favorites and that agencies of the Government concerned with the making of Virgin Islands rum must conform to the regulations set forth to govern all other distillers and importers. A few days ago A. K. Hamilton & Co., one of the domestic rum makers who feels that the Govern- ment here is en- tering into com- with by subsi- dizing the making of rum in the Virgin Islands me copies of iy pawrence. the protests Mr. Hamilton filed with the Federal Alcohol Admnistration. He stated | that his complaints were of no avail.| But the F. A. disputes this and | courteously furnishes me with copies | of their letters to the New York dis-| tributor of the Virgin Islands rum | and to the A. K. Hamilton Co., poin ing out that on both ril 19 and 2 they had taken “appropriate action, that the announcements by the distributors of the Virgin Islands rum had already gone and could not be recalled but that assurances were given ti that the particul plained of would not be repeated. “Government” Sponsorship Remains. The record appears clearly to ab- | golve the F. A. A. of any favol just because another department of | the Government gone o the | rum-making bu: in competition | with private rur ers. But this does not dispose of the embar which undoubted! the F. A. A. by the fact ber of the Preside sponsoring the sale of a produ as “Government House Rum.” Nobody has as yet filed a protest | with the F. A. A. because the name “government” is being emy describe the Tum to prospective buyers and it is doubtful whether the F. A. A, would have any right to forbid it because, after all Government is ma On the other hand, & question as t private maker. to mpete the only course 1 t their wares as being as | product arguments used | rum makers cc up the money so as to help the islands | with its relief problem. Private rum | makers ir e the United States would seem to have the r to ask the | public to buy their products because | the taxes collected go to support the Federal Treasury and the latter in turn spends huge quantities of it to aid persons on relief. Lack “Government” Salesmanship. ‘The chief difficulty is that the pri- vate rum makers have no brand name which is quite as authoritative as one with the word “government” on it. Inasmuch as this is their real prob- lem, maybe they haven't begun to be as aggressive competitors of the Gov- ernment as they might be appear that there is on why the private rum mak- uldn't get out a rum and call | it “‘Congressional Rum,” or if that is | too general a term it might be called “Senate Rum.” | “New Deal” Rum. | The truth is the Federal Govern- | ment is in the rum business because the Roosevelt administration in gen- eral and the Department of the In- | terior in particular put it there. So | perhaps the most accurate title for a | brand after all would be “New Deal | Rum.” | Looking in the telephone books of our big cities, one finds many busi- nesses which style themselves “New Deal” So it might be that the so- Betty Furness in “The Good 0ld Soak” Now at Loew’s Capitol German Official Promises Workers | | the childless matrimony,” he said. dren.” Something Wrong in Judiciary Committee Caused Repudiation of Court-Packing Bill. BY PAUL MALLON. OMETHING went wrong inside the Senate Judiciary Committee when it repudiated the President’s court packing bill. At the very moment the committee was rejecting the White House program, an eminent Congressional leader was assuring his associates definitely that the committee would not do it. When the bad news was brought to him, he was so shocked he would not talk to any one the rest of the day. At the White House, surprise was likewise indicated. The President did not get his wind back in time to discuss the matter in his press conference later that day. The fact is the presidential major-domos thought they had arranged for an entirely different result. They are not saying anything now, except among themselves, but they thought the committee was going to have a tie vote (nine to nine) on the Logan compromise. This is & proposal to pack the court at the rate of one a year instead of six at once. Such a develop- ment would have saved the court packing program from the ignominy of a direct defeat. It would have lifted the issue out of the committee to the Senate floor for open discussion with the least possible pain to all. Everything was fixed for it, or, at least, nearly everything. The skids were greased, all except one skid. ‘What happened, the Roosevelt domos say, was that one of their pals on the committee was asleep at the switch. He was supposed to vote for the Logan compromise, but got to voting against all compro- B mises so fast he did not know when to stop. The question now has arisen as to whether he took or was given a sleeping powder before the meeting. If he had voted for the Logan proposal, the vote would have been exactly nine to nine. As it was, the compromise was defeated ten to eight, and the committee went on to defeat the President’s plan by the same score. What it seems to boil down to is that the domos did a very bad job on the committee, or else some natural and unavoidable mis- understanding arose. . At any rate, they were flabbergasted and were unable to do anything about it after it occurred. A Democratic group of anti-packers around the Senate has come to be known familiarly in the corridors as “the lion-tamers club.” The title grows from an obvious, but not generally advertised fact. They make no secret, in conversation, of their displeasure over the general attitude taken by the White House since the last election, on other matters as well the court What brought their resentment out more distinctly was the latest edict of the President against compromise. Since then, they have been talking (in private, of course), about what happened 1o Mr. Wilson on article X when the war President stood against any senatorial dotting of “i's” and any extra senatorial crossing of “ryr Their personal viewpoint seems to be that it is up to them not only to defeat the court program on its merits, but (as one of their number describes it) to “make the President become a President again.” That is, they believe the old natural constitutional checks and balances prevailing in Government prior to the depression may be restored, if the President is just once defeated on an issue. Not all anti-packers feel that way, but enough of them do to create & very strong and somewhat bitter situation. The circulation of foolish rumors and inflammatory personal stories against Mr. Roosevelt is again causing some inner concern here. One especially fantastic idea was circulated in a confidential letter by a news agency implying that the President collapsed in a coma at his desk be- fore he went South for a rest. ‘There is, of course, not a grain of truth in the suggestion. All Presidents have had to put up with this sort of stuff. The trouble is they cannot deny such rumors without dignifying them, and generally the denial gets wider circulation than the original rumors. Most Presidents have been un- able to maintain their patience against irresponsible gossip. The only satisfactory solution seems to be a deep and hearty laugh. * o ok X Andrew Mellon has moved menancingly close to the White House. He has bought a building in Jackson place, almost across the street from the Executive Mansion. He intends to house there the architects working on the art memorial However, his relative standing is indicated by the fact that John Lewis has also just bought a much bigger and better place around the corner. (Copyright. 1937.) EMERGENCY NURSES AWARDED DIPLOMAS 29 Are Graduated From Hospital School—Prizes Are Given Honor Students. Maj. Gist Blair, president of the Emergency Hospital Board of Directors, presented diplomas Wednesday night to 29 graduates of the Hospital School of Nursing. Prizes were awarded students in all classes with the highest averages by Mrs. George Scriven, president of the Hospital Women's Board. Awards were won by Miss Dorothy Forsht, third; Miss H. Marlowe Davis, second year, and Miss Marguerite Stillwagen, first year. Honorable mentions were given: the Misses Katherine Edmond- son, Anna McKimmey, Evelyn Jack- son, La True Godfrey, Fanny Bullard and Frances Brock. Miss Mabel Boardman of the Amer- | ican Red Cross addressed the grad- “We | uates and the invocation was given now must aim for three or four chil- | by Rev. Oliver J. Hart, rector of St. (For each family.) John's Episcopal Church. BRIDE... Rings. Came lution for the private rum makers is to meet competition in the old- fashioned American way, not by urg- ing the Government agencies here to abolish the competition but to wel- come it and prove to the American people—now that the administration | sanctions the drinking of rum by en- gaging in the liquor business—that when better rums are made the Anterican rum makers will make them. (Copyright, 1937.) MONEY FOR BABIES and Farmers Aid. WILDBAD. Germany, May 21 (P).— Wilhelm Frick, Germany's minister of interior, promised workers and farmers yesterday they would get more | money for more babies, Opening the annual convention of public health officials, Frick declared the number of births under the Nazi regime had increased from 993,126 in | 1932 to 1.290,000-in 1936. “This, howevér, is merely the first victory over the unmarried state and the Lovely Bridal Ensemble 12 Diamonds artfully $ 5 5 fashioned in new mod- FOR BOTH ern designs. This com- bination has 12 brilliant diamonds set in solid white or yellow gold. Will gladen the heart of every bride. Pay Only $1.00 Week Jewelers Since 1849 1004 F St. N.W. | tionalism; necessarily The Star’s. Such opinions are presented in The Star’s effort to give all sides of questions of interest to its readers, although such opinions may be contradictory among themselves and directly opposed to The Star’s. Inviting Press Censorship What Burlesque Threatened to Theater, Lurid Stories May Do to Newspapers. BY CTOROTHY THOMPSON. ONGRATULATIONS to Gov. Lehman for his veto of the New York State stage cen- sorship bill. The grounds for his veto were those that any lib- eral, Democrat and believer in law should take. Under this bill, the New York city license . commissioner” would have been granted the pow- ers of a theater commissar; he could, at will, have revoked the theater licenses for a year, keep- ing their doors closed until the theater manage- ment should win or lose its case in court. The bill opened the way for confisca- tion of property without due process of law, and for arbitrary censorship exercised by one man. It was a fur- ther step in the direction of govern= ment by commission, of arbitrary law- making, and it rightly was opposed by all who are interested in free speech and popular government. But there is a lesson to be learned from this experience. Why was the bill introduced at all, in a free coun- try. whose Constitution guarantees free speech, and why did it have the support of many decent and patri- otic citizens? Simply because one branch of the theater, the burlesque shows, had outraged the sense of public decency to the point where & large share of the public cared rather more for public morals than they did for freedom. Abuse of Freedom. A section of the free stage had been used to commercialize human licen- tiousness, depravity and sex hunger, to a point where, by no stretch of the imagination could the shows be justi- fied as art or legitimate entertainment. The cynical abuse of freedom in the interests of profits led to a crackdown not offly on the offenders, but to an attempt to regiment the entire thea- ter. Dorothy Thompsen. Incidentally, the abuse of freedom | in the Federal theater project has led that organization, which started out to make the freest possible stage, to | appoint its own censorship, partly because young radicals set out to cap- ture the Federal theater for their own political ends, again, with complete cynicism, thinking that freedom meant their right to use the money of the | taxpayers, appropriated for the relief | of distress, to propagate views abhor- rent to most of the taxpayers. Newspapers May Suffer. And this leads me to say a few words about freedom of the press and | to venture a prediction. The predic- tion is this: That unless the news- papers, particularly those of the great cities, voluntarily, and out of profes- sional ethics, cease the appalling ballyhooing of crime, the ruthless assassination of character, the unjus- tified probing into private lives in mat- ters which have no conceivable public interest or social importance, the trial of persons in the public prints before their indictment and afterward before their conviction, and the exploitation of the basest human conduct, for pur- poses of profit derived from sensa- unless they curb them- | prisoned for debts was persuaded to of their lives to escape rigid censor- ship and to maintain any freedom at all. This column has already expressed its indignation at the conduct of the press in the Gedeon case, where a man, since dismissed as innocent, was pil- loried for days as a probable murderer of his own child. An even more atro- clous example of this sort of charac- ter assassination occurred this week. ‘This time the victim was a 3-year-old boy. selves, they will one day have the fight An infant who had been left ap- parently perfectly well was found dead in & New York apartment. The only person present was & 3-year-old child. The child—aged three—was asked if he had hit his sister, and replied “Yes.” So he was presented to the gasping public as a tiny mon- ster, the victim of insatiable jealousy, who had battered his baby sister to death. Results in Innocence. Now it develops that the baby sister died in convulsions of a deranged thymus gland—a sudden death for in- fants which is infrequent, but by no means extraordinary. Meanwhile lit- tle brother has been made into a creature to be shunned by anxious parents. The newspapers, and especially the more sensational ones this week, have been such as to cause all parents to dread the time when their own chil- dren can read! The ballyhooing of the terrible case of Mrs. Tiernan is reading to make the blood run cold. Do all the photographs, do all the highly dramatized details, have any- thing really to do with the dissemi- nation of news of public interest or importance? Nothing in the burlesque shows could possibly have been more re- volting than a life story which a New York paper ran in four or five in- stallments some days ago. An ex- follies beauty and movie star hos- pitalized for drug addiction and im- tell the story of her life. Story Between the Lines. ‘The story included her relations with one husband and two lovers, and one of these stories is material for materia medica or the works of Kraft-Ebbing, and that the paper did not dare to print all the details did not prevent it from writing all around them and conveying luridly a story to induce nausea. After all, mothers did not send their children to burlesque shows, but | how can any one protect his child against this sort of filth distributed in papers available at any corner or left on seats in busses and subways? This column believes in a free press. This column is opposed to govern- ment censorship and wants to see it | prevented. But it will be proposed as sure as death and taxes if this sort| of thing continues to go on. In England the press was saved | from government censorship by the | action of the National Union of Jour- nalists, the British equivalent of the Newspaper Guild, the trade union of reporters and editors. Precisely in order to prevent censorship, and be- cause, also, they were sick and tired of being given assignments which no one with pretensions to journalistic ethics or the instincts of a decent hu- man being could stomach, they de- manded self-control and got it. Only the newspaper men themselves can stop this sort of thing by non-govern Tl take in Hires comes from DELICIOUS Clot i O NCE you taste the delicious flavor of the real Root Juices in Hires, you’ll never be content with imitation root beers made of imita- tion flavors. Only genuine Hires will satisfy you. Learn the difference now by ordering a few bottles of Hires from your grocer or at any restau- rant or refreshment stand. You'll enjoy its natural, wholesome flavor. good - Js good for 40 t tastes i This Changing World Berlin Becoming Convinced It Is Useless to Protest Press Criticisms in U. S. BY CONSTANTINE BROWN. MBASSADOR DISCKHOFF has, 80 far, been spared by his govern- ment a perfectly useless call at the State Department to protest against the statements of Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, who expressed the opinion that Hitler was just a paperhanger—and & poor one at that. For reasons of prestige the German papers took the matter up with the usual violence displayed by the “managed” press in the autoritarian states. They indicated that the German Ambassador in Washington would make the usual diplomatic representations. But past experiences have convinced, apparently, the German govern- ment that it would be useless to talk the matter over with the representa- tives of the United States Government since they can do nothing about what, is written or said in a country where there is free speech and the press can write whatever it likes. * % * % Some three years ago when the representative of the King of Iran protested against certain things printed in the American press about his sovereign, William Phillips, who at that time was At Undersecretary of State, expressed his sorrow about the whole matter and added: “But we can do nothing with the press. We are powerless and have to take it gracefully on the chin ‘when newspaper men make fun or attack us. Why don’t you do the same thing?" * ok K K Of course, dictators must appear, in the eyes of their own people, above any criticism. There is always some danger, in spite of the strict censorship which exists in all dictatorships, that spoken or printed matter showing the rulers as ordinary humans might percolate into the country. This would harm the dictators. Hence, great prominence is given in the newspapers of their respective countries every time some derogatory remarks are made about Mussolini, Hitler, the King of Iran, the Emperor of Japan, etc, then the matter is dropped. The staff of the German and the Italian Embassies in Wash- ington realize that in this country more than anywhere else the State Department and the Federal Government cannot prevent anybody from expressing the most frank opinion about everything. They know that the only way to avoid slurs on their country and their leaders is to get on the “right side” of the press and leading public men and gain their good will. Mussolini has understood this now. ‘The previous Italian Ambassador, Rosso, and the present Ambassador, Suvich, have not had to walk the two flights of steps to Mr. Hull's office about this or that which might have been said about Il Duce and fascismo. It is probable that Hitler will not force his good-will representative to make useless protests, which serve only to further irritate people. * % ok % It is hard—if not impossible—to follow the trend of thought of British statesmen these days. There seems no unity of opinion regarding the world situation in the British cabinet. Thus, @ few weeks ago Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain assured the House of Commons that the general out- look in Europe is much improved and the war clouds are slowly dispersing. Only two weeks later Premier Stanley Baldwin told the representatives of the dominions at the opening of the imperial conference that there is a grave danger of war in Europe. On Tuesday last, Baldwin told the youths of the empire that the treaty of Versailles was a lamentable mistake and that the League of Nations was these days nothing but bunk. On Wednesday Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, stated that the hopes of the democracies are based mainly in the continuation of the excellent work of the League, * ok % K In trying to make the Reich a completely self-contained economic unit, the German sclentists are by way of performing real miracles. Assistant Dictator Goering on the occasion of the opening of the Dusseldorf Exhibition, “A Nation at Work,” announced to the German people that their butter problem will soon be over. German scien- tists, Gen. Goering said, are Work- ng now in laboratories to “ex- tract an excellent kind of butter out of coal” Goering also hinted that the international economic conference. which is being prepared now in London, Paris, Washington and Brussels is likely to prove just an- other failure, because as long as nations do not trust each other politically they cannot be expected to trust each other in economic dealings * x % x The foreign offices of the democratic states hope that in the event of a major crisis in Europe the Johnson act barring all defaulters from borrowing money in this country will become inoperative. They seem to base this optimism on certain hints thrown out confidentially from the White House, where the Johnson act is considered as doomed to failure when other than materialistic interests are involved. ment action, and that they could stop it if they were widely enough organized is one good reason for urg- ing them to get together. (Copyrignt, 18 Cities Small Before 1800. In the vear 1800 there was no city | in the United States with a popula- tion of more than 75,000. these to make sure. Please send the rest” THE@ON THE LABEL IS FOR YOUR PROTECTION —~A GUARANTEE OF REAL Root Juices IN HIRES ROOT BEER THE \ Headline Folk and What They Do Cardinal Mundelein a Favorite in All Re- ligious Creeds. (Due to the absence of Lemuel F. Parton, this column is contributed by members of the Consolidated Press staff.) NEW YORKER born and bred, firmly intrenched especially in the hearts of citizens of all religious creeds and denomi- nations across the East River, where from 1897 to 1909 he was chancellor of the Diocese of Brooklyn, George Cardinal Mundelein, Archbishop of Chicago, finds himself the subject of a d. matic inci dent between the Reich and the United States Government as & result of his re- cent statement concerning the current monas- trials in y and the references to an unnamed “Aus- trian paper- hanger.” e the youngest cardi- nals in the Sa- cred College—he was also the youngest man ever to receive a diploma from Manhattan College, having been grad- uated after two yea 1889, at the 17, in New York in 1872, he re- education at St. 1d the old De La Sa cond street. Being graduated from this famous old sec- ondary school in 1887, he entered Manhattan and, as said, won his diploma in two years. Then he went to St. Vinc e, Beatty, Pa, and from ap- pointed by Bishop McDor study at the Urban College of Propaganda | in Rome was ordained to the priesthood Retu was app Bishop McDonnell a | attached to the household of the b had s Li of Cardinal Mundelein. Nicholas School Academy on his priestly position as rector dral Chapel of All Saints r, 1897. he became chan= cese of Brooklyn, rk won hi Academy, lowed, chiefly to the see of chbishop to succeed the his promotion in Chicago as late Archbis 1924, he became o can princes of t Church. Cardinal Mundelei writer knew whi spending a Sum! | Long Island. | with th picturesque Our Lady of the Isle, is a type of man who infallibly makes a strong | impression upon those with whom he | comes in contact, whether they be of the church, or the laity or whatever | religious persuasion. One of his outstanding achieve- ments in Chicago was the establish- | ment of the Quigley Memorial Semi- nary and the $10,000.000 Priests’ Sem- inary at Argo, 12 miles from the eity. | (Cop 1937.) le church, 2 GLASS SIZE 10c—FAMILY SIZE CHARLES E. HIRES CO. To Distributors and Dealers Write or Phons HARFORD ROAD AND B. & O. R. R. Baltimore, Md. Wolf 9110 {