LIQUOR: Hoyt for Choate

Repeal of Prohibition at any time in the near future is a flat impossibility. The repugnant proposal to permit States to dispense liquor will never prove acceptable.

These solemn predictions were put forth in 1929 by Presiding Judge Franklin Chase Hoyt of New York City’s Children’s Court in a temperance essay which won him a $25,000 prize offered by William Randolph Hearst. Last week President Roosevelt accepted the resignation of Joseph H. Choate Jr. as chief of the defunct Federal Alcohol Control Administration, appointed Franklin Hoyt to head the new Federal Alcohol Administration.

Like Mr. Choate, whose father was the late Ambassador to Great Britain, Judge Hoyt has a famed ancestor. His grandfather, Salmon Portland Chase, whose portrait adorns $10,000 bills, was Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and later (1864-73) Chief Justice of the U. S. Grandson Hoyt has won distinction for himself as a champion and judge of children. In 1908 he became the youngest (31) judge ever appointed to New York’s Court of Special Sessions, helped start the fight which led to the adoption of a constitutional amendment creating separate children’s courts throughout the State. He was for 18 years presiding justice of New York City’s Children’s Court, estimated when he retired in 1933 that he had handled 50,000 cases of juvenile delinquency.

An optimistic, mild-mannered gentleman with red-gold hair and a lofty brow, Judge Hoyt divides his time between a Hudson River estate and a Georgia pecan plantation, likes books, privacy and decorum. Last week when a tactless newshawk reminded him of his prize-winning predictions forPublisher Hearst, the new Alcohol Administrator declared with some feeling: “Whatever I wrote about the liquor problem in 1929 is water under the bridge, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”