The Holy War
328 THE COMMONWEAL July 31 , I929 i which I am giving to national candidacy." Of course there is a purely human aversion to loquacity about one's ambitions. There is always the danger...
...No one expects Mr...
...And accepting it, for the moment, as a certainty, has gone far toward satisfactorily explaining the New Yorker's course at the recent governors' conference in New London...
...Wilson then admit that it has had its chance...
...From a distance, however, he is not unattractive...
...Clarence True Wilson's article in Collier's headed Call Out the Marines, it is in itself a comment on that article...
...He must know, too, that the prohibition agent is not merely an officer of the law with the assumptions, privileges and immunities under which he operates today...
...But the public reaction to prohibition in I932 is unguessable and a Democratic standard-bearer may perforce have to be a dry...
...He is no more to be approved, or disapproved, than a bolt of lightning...
...We must insist that his powers are police powers and not military powers and not law-making powers...
...Roosevelt's ambition to be a candidate in I932 that some political writers have been concerned...
...that the first offense has not involved a prison sentence...
...Wilson thinks that prohibition has never had a chance, by which he means that drinking in itself has not yet been made a crime...
...What he wants, apparently, is not a chance but a set-up...
...Of course there is a purely human aversion to loquacity about one's ambitions...
...he is a law unto himself...
...And so it is not for us to approve or disapprove of him as though he were the common urban variety of policeman, or a rustic constable...
...He shoots in the name of Providence, as though the kingdom on earth were to be carried with a gun...
...But for the present he is much too close for comfort, and if you have been living recently in Buffalo, Aurora, Illinois, International Falls, Minnesota, or Tecumseh, Oklahoma, you might say that it is time we began to put some distance between ourselves and him...
...time we began to speed the day when the historical imagination might be free to give us whatever profit and pleasure we are ever to derive from his existence...
...Roosevelt to consider himself as a candidate for the White House at the present time...
...And failed...
...We must insist that our government go about the business of prohibition enforcement with the quiet efficiency which is to characterize the Hoover administration, and not with the frenzy, the fanaticism and the hysteria that characterize a holy war...
...Even the Anti-saloon League will not accept so simple a definition of his status...
...Clarence True Wilson's demand for a bigger and more zealous war...
...Another is under the thumbs of men who in ten years have not been known to demonstrate any humor but ill humor...
...To insist on this, of course, is to admit that we have no sense of humor...
...But there are situations in which it is not usually possible to indulge a sense of humor...
...that martial law has not been proclaimed in New York and Maryland, and, presumably, in Montana and Wisconsin...
...Roosevelt of reasoning thus...
...Coming so soon after Dr...
...that the standing army of the United States has not yet been utilized in the cause...
...There is always the danger that the achievement will fall so disproportionately short of the desired goal as to be ridiculous...
...It is about Mr...
...No fault can be found with the entertainment of this ambition...
...that when he enters a home without warrant, or shoots on suspicion and investigates afterward, the government shall seek his punishment, just as the state now seeks to punish a policeman who has been too free with his authority...
...He dreams, perhaps, of a kingdom in heaven assured to all who kill in the creed of the Eighteenth Amendment...
...We must insist that he be regarded as an ordinary police officer, bound not only to defend the law but also to observe it...
...Roosevelt need not have been so cautious about the wet-dry debate which he himself precipitated by reading the Wickersham letter...
...We do not accuse Mr...
...The way to do this is to deflate him: to prick his sacrosanct illusion...
...One of them is at the point of a sawed-off shotgun...
...Will Dr...
...He is classed not with the guardians of the law, but with the law-makers...
...Wilson is all for the bayonet and the machine-gun, but Mr...
...If we should say yes to this scheme, what would he promise ? Suppose that after four years of enforcement by the military there should still remain a widespread opposition to prohibition...
...Wickersham, whose committee is to study the enforcement, not of one law, but of all laws, must know well enough that it is this attitude which has already resulted in the violation of laws much older than prohibition...
...Wickersham had in mind when he suggested to the conference of governors that the national and state prohibition laws might "be modified so as to become reasonably enforceable," but the implication is clear that he does not consider it possible to enforce these laws as they now exist without recourse to violent measures...
...Will he, and those who stand with him, suggest modification then...
...there is some occult satisfaction in the pattern of his fierceness, as, from a distance, there is satisfaction in the spectacular manifestations of other things cruel in themselves...
...Will they have been persuaded...
...It is in this way, no doubt, that future students of history will look at him, just as some of us regard, not altogether unamiably, the murderous doings of Mohammed and Attila, of Alexander and Tamerlane...
...He is of the prophets, particularly of the prophets who were also conquerors in blood...
...To have done so would effect a piece of adroit political maneuvering and he ought to be happy, not disturbed, that many observers have noted and acclaimed it...
...Solely considering the empire state, which is wet and where he is considered a wet, Mr...
...328 THE COMMONWEAL July 31 , I929 i which I am giving to national candidacy...
...Perhaps for modificationists the only way out consistent with good nature is to agree, in return for a promise, to Dr...
...THE HOLY WAR 'O ONE is quite sure what sort of modification Mr...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 13
