The Willebrandt Searchlight

...Greater opportunities...

...This quarter of a million did not go into his estate, cash though it was...

...Campaigns cannot be run without money...

...It all reaches back to the little unnoticed ward boss or city boss, sitting unseen in a dingy town far away and not even a name to the Washington correspondents or to anybody connected with the national government...

...No special privilege was conceded to them as ecclesiastics...

...Willebrandt is so merciful as to shield his very familiar name...

...Though the name of Father Andrew White will always be connected with the landing of the Ark and Dove and of the first missionary days at Saint Mary's, yet in this fertile valley up the Potomac lay the real home of the "Apostle of Maryland...

...The ground is commonly a black mold above and a foot within ground a reddish colour...

...But it is just as true of all the other manifestations of politics in action which crop up throughout these unshirted revelations of hers...

...The distillery people said to them, "You won't last thirty days...

...Without even knowing who he was, though I am sure it was one of a certain two, I affirm confidently that he didn't know who they were and cared nothing whether they were guillotined or shot at sunrise...

...When huge campaign contributions became a scandal, those legislators who are always legislating to make water run uphill enacted what is known as "corrupt practices legislation," though it hasn't much to do with corrupt practices...

...The information was correct...

...Father White could speak the Indians' language, he knew their customs, he helped and advised them and was always welcome among them...

...OLD SAINT THOMAS'S MANOR By ETHEL ROBY HAYDEN NE bright June morning in the year I64I, a young Indian brave stood on a hill above the little group of wigwams that was Potopaco and watched a small boat come around the great bend of the Potomac...

...The moral...

...In this case it may not have stretched down so far as the little local precinct boss, for Mrs...

...The legislation has always been restrictive and is now prohibitive...

...Dozens," says Mrs...

...Now why should alcohol ally itself with politics or vice versa...

...It affected somebody, though...

...All the great men from mayor to governor and senatormwith that characteristically ironical courtesy of hers, she almost noisily omits to mention Presidents--are dependent, she says, on "the smaller politician with his large force of deputies and assistants...

...Was the Cabinet officer personally interested in the La Montagnes...

...Not all of us income-taxpayers in other lines of business sign checks for a million and a quarter when March 15 comes around...

...The old-time saloon-keeper did not make fortunes mounting into the millions in a year or two...

...There is such an alliance, in case anyone doubts it, and it began along with American politics, not along with the Volstead Act...

...The wigwam was the foreruhner of the manor seat which was to be the scene of so much Catholic history...

...466 THE COMMONWEAL September ti, 1929 THE WILLEBRANDT SEARCHLIGHT By CHARLES WILLIS THOMPSON ACH generation thinks the dismaying things it sees are peculiar to itself, whereas its granddads and theirs saw the same discouraging things, were just as dismayed by them, and went to their graves believing they had lived in the bad new times...

...I have an extremely good idea who it was, and cannot understand why Mrs...

...for whether he sits in legislative hails or in some back" room, the politician is the lawmaker...

...As early as 1639 Father White made the village a Catholic centre when he converted and baptized the young Indian queen and 13o of her subjects...

...The land was called Saint Thomas's Manor and was taken up under the "conditions of plantation" in the same way that lands were acquired by other settlers...

...So it was that the Jesuits' missions started in Charles County, Maryland--the missions which in all the years since then have had their source at old Saint Thomas's Manor overlooking what is known today as the Port Tobacco valley...

...They pleaded guilty...

...It abounds with delicate springs which are our best drinks...

...The unnoticed ward politician or city boss is content to stay in the background, but he gets what he wants...

...Birds diversely feathered there are infinite, as eagles, swans, hernes, bitterns, geese, ducks and partridges, reds, blew, particoloured and the like, by which will be seen the place abounds not alone with profit but with pleasure...

...Did that $~8,ooo contribution affect the Cabinet officer so powerfully as to make him intrigue with the President to let these confessed lawbreakers off ? A hundred to one, no...

...The moral I prefer to draw is that in the forty-ninth century A. D. mankind will have learned that it is no use enacting laws to make water run uphill...

...Other fathers helped to evangelize the settlements elsewhere, but Potopaco was Father White's special domain...

...Willebrandt, "of United States district attorneys and their assistants owe their appointment to the favor of not only congressmen and senators, but of the whole political machine, ranging from deputy constables and assistant assessors to mayors and councilmen...

...Therefore the liquor dealer, if he has any wish to get along in life, has to deal with the politician, or in other words the lawmaker...

...but it was given in the form of a personal loan from a friend to the great and wealthy senator...

...But he loved it--it was of Potopaco that he wrote to England: The soil is so excellent that we cannot sett downe foot but tread on strawberries, raspberries, fallen mulberries, acchorns, walnuts, saxafras, etc.--and these in the wildest woods...

...Willebrandt explains...

...How did it come to belong to the party...

...politician * The first part of The HZillebrandt Searchlight appeared last week...

...It was given the party as a "campaign contribution...

...A wigwam was made ready for his use and the squaws had prepared a fine meal of corn pone, hominy and a special sweetish drink made from cornmeal and native fruits...

...most likely had never heard their names...

...Figure the money he made for yourself...

...She turns her searchlight on the "personal loan" in politics...

...But there is,a big difference in the fact that prohibition gives the alliance greater opportunities, greater power ; and likewise greater wealth, which brings us to the subject of graft...

...But the same thing might have happened to any agent of any branch of the government, as well as to these two prohibition agents...

...Most bootleggers, probably, pay their income taxes like other people, but these cases happened to be heard of because the taxpayers tried to cheat the Income Tax Bureau...

...He reaches even into the courts...

...The politician" is a witch-word, meaning somebody, anybody...

...Willebrandt says that the graft-hunting politician "saw the greater opportunity for graft in the initial stages of attempted enforcement of the Volstead Act...

...No, by the shades of Morris Tekulsky, of the Wine, Liquor and Beer Dealers' Association, and of King Alcohol in the distilleries and breweries and everywhere else in the land...

...Willebrandt, as Assistant Attorney General, looked up some cases of tax evasion and found that one bootlegger owed the government $I,3OO,OOO, "that is," she explains, "the tax, not the money he made...

...That politics is hopelessly wicked...

...He had been told by a congressman, who had been told by somebody lower down, and so on...

...Willebrandt tells, for instance, of two honest and efficient prohibition sleuths named Connor and Quigley, who began making trouble for a distillery...

...Is there no difference, then, between the alliance under prohibition and the alliance before...

...Working all day as a priest and missionary, he spent the long evenings by the light of a pine-knot candle giving to the world some of the most valuable additions to Indian philology...

...The somebody it affected was an officer of the Republican National Committee, chairman, treasurer or what not...

...that is the only difference...

...Father White never came back, but in I648 Father Copley returned, and the following year he acquired formal possession of the Port Tobacco mission for the Jesuits...

...In some statutes they limited the size of campaign contributions, and in others they decreed that all campaign contributions should be published, so that everybody might know who was giving up, and how much...

...Commissioner, or whoever sent the telegram, had nothing against Connor and Quigley...

...The alcohol dealer, from the human desire to make money in his business, desires and desired his business to be as little restricted as possible, just as the coal merchant or the druggist would in similar circumstances...

...Who are the politicians who are in the alliance with liquor, and how far does their influence extend...

...The second Lord Baltimore was determined that no land of the province should be held by ecclesiastics as such, or claimed for the support of re...

...that is what he boils down into, United States senator or ward boss...

...First, since we have mentioned it first, we will take up "this alliance between politics and booze...

...By the time the young sentinel reached him he was surrounded by red-skin hosts crowding to give him welcome, for he was no stranger to Potopaco...

...Mrs...

...not prohibition politics, but United States politics, played as it always has been, always will be...

...The solitary black-clad figure rowed steadily with practised oar to the shore of the village and pushed the boat well up into the rushes...

...Alcohol is an industrial product...

...There he composed his catechism in the native dialect long before Eliot wrote his Indian Bible, and there he compiled a grammar and a dictionary of the Indian language together with other minor works...

...The people they get it from do not want it known that they gave it, much less how much they gave...

...The Cabinet minister or senator looks like a very great man, the humble ward heeler like a small one, but she is merciless in showing how the lion dances for the pleasSeptember I I, r929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 467 t ure of the gnat...

...The politician, since it is he who makes and always must make the laws-that is what politics means, in the last shaking-out of its meaning--can relax or tighten the restriction or even the prohibition...

...Representative had nothing against the two agents either...

...It belonged to the party, and each of the two great men became in turn its trustees...

...Some senator or representative had told him to get rid of them, and he knew if he did not he would have an unhappy time in a shortened public life...

...Again: This happened in a Volstead violation case, but it might as well have happened in any other kind of case...

...Then, in 1645, Puritan England put out a vicious hand to the throat of the little colony in Maryland, and Father White and his companions were seized and transported as malefactors across the ocean...

...To hear this generation talk, you would think the alliance began with bootleggers, hijackers, quick-trigger dry agents, Rum Row and all the glories of the prohibition scene...

...Again, with that deft courtesy of hers, she loudly fails to mention judges...

...It is evident from the res gestae that these cases of great fortunes Mrs...

...nor was it the other great man's, either...

...But suppose it was...

...Private and personal loans from Tom to Dick are nobody's business and do not have to be made public...

...and liquor dealer got along very well, and "understood each other" as excellently, a hundred years ago as nOW...

...She found five other bootleggers who owed somewhat smaller sums, but still monumental...

...Because the money, obviously, was not his...

...It is politics...

...Secretary or Mr...

...This little village of the Potopaco Indians lay near the head of a creek, tributary to the Potomac, thirty miles from where the river flows into Chesapeake Bay...

...It is not the result of prohibition," says Mrs...

...Willebrandt describes came to her notice when prohibition was still a young and noble experiment...

...It allies--no, that is not a misprint for "allied"--itself with politics because the great American genius has decided that such things as alcohol are a proper subject of legislation...

...Willebrandt writes of prohibition, because it is the side of government she knows about...

...All is high wood except where the Indians have clere for come...

...She tells of the case of two brothers named La Montagne, indicted for violating the Volstead law...

...That is the difference, and the only difference, between what prohibition has done for graft collection and what the old open-saloon system did for it...

...Neither human nature nor American politics changes, and it is the rule still, and will continue to be...

...Mrs...

...With the coming of the white men its name was soon corrupted into Port Tobacco which, though meaningless, has stood the test of years...

...Anyone who was engaged in politics in the years before prohibition, as I was," says this experienced politician, knows that that was the rule in "the preVolsteadian period...

...Records gathered from various sources do not all agree on dates, but it is likely that Father John A1tham and Father Roger Rigbie were the companions of Father White from time to time, until the last year of his stay at Potopaco when he was joined by Father Thomas Copley...

...This was Father Andrew White from the pale-face settlement down the river at the place they called Saint Mary's...

...Senator or Mr...

...Bootlegging, therefore, is a far more profitable business than ever was saloon-keeping or distilling or grape-growing...

...Therefore the temptation to graft is greater with the politician, and also the grafting politician gets more out of it, for he now has a fatter till to tap...

...Mrs...

...The unnoticed local boss reaches high but silently...

...The most simple-minded citizen must see that the bigger the fortunes piled up by the protected lawbreaker, the bigger and easier the graft for the politician who preys on him...

...Mr...

...Willebrandt turns her searchlight in that direction...

...In such cases, when (as rarely happens) there is a Willebrandt to turn the searchlight on the darkrless, how puppet-like appear the figures of the great men, from President to mayor, dancing at the jerk of the strings in the fingers of some little politician unknown even by name to the adoring public...

...So the law, like the prohibition and Negro suffrage amendments and the personal property tax and so many others, is a law highly honored in words and not otherwise...

...These laws are obeyed---strictly obeyed, in form, like the Volstead law...

...The gang he runs, in coarser words...

...It was not in the assets of either National or State Committee, which by the law directing water to run uphill must always be public...

...They lasted twenty-one days, and then received a telegram from Washington reading: "Your services are discontinued at the close of business as of December 3 I, 1925 , without dereliction or misconduct...

...There is nothing new," says Mabel Willebrandt, "about--" Well, what she happens to be speaking about is "this alliance between politics and booze," to complete her sentence...

...It is politics, that's all...

...Willebrandt hints that cash had been turned into the treasury of the Republican National Committee to the extent of $~8,ooo...

...Therefore the organization--that is, the candidate's managers--have to get a lot more...

...The low limitation placed on contributions by legislation would not carry a single campaign...

...his heirs turned it over to another great man in the Republican party...

...Not through anything in the nature of things, any more than potatoes should, or butter or wool or machinery...

...Willebrandt...

...She tells of a famous senator, the boss of his state (she might as well have given his name, since anyone can guess it) who left, among other 468 THE COMMONWEAL September II, 1929 riches, a certain sum of $250,000 in cash...

...but this morning the village had a special welcome for him as he haft come down from Kittamaquindi the capital of the Piscataways, to make his home with them...

...Whereupon "a Cabinet officer," she says, and other powerful persons interceded to get the case quashed, though the defendants had no defense and had made none...

...it might have been loaned by any wealthy corporation desirous of favors from government, just as well...

...But they run counter to an element in human nature and to a factor in all the politics that ever was played...

...Willebrandt implies that it was "loaned" by the distillers to pay for lax enforcement of prohibition, but that makes no difference...

...There is no difference whatever in the alliance, which is created by the mere existence of restrictive legislation and will never end--unless restrictive legislation does, which is as likely as that the cow will jump over the moon...

...For one thing, they generally gave it in the expectation of certain favors from the incoming administration, and it will not look well when, next year, they receive those favors...

...And this dealing with the politician soon became not an arduous thing, but a phase of business no more to be worried about than the cost of paying for lighting or truckage...