President Hoover at the Gridiron Club dinner last month heard the shade of Historian John Fiske reveal "the truth" about Lincoln's attitude toward slavery. Fiske quoted Lincoln as saying: "The great issue of slavery must be met. We are engaged in a noble experiment. . . . I am appointing a commission to go into the whole labor situation, including slavery, which will report sometime, somewhere, somehow."
The President could smile at this parody of his appointment of the National Law Enforcement Commission. But it was no smiling matter for him last week when senators, instead of Gridiron japesters, began in earnest to hector his commission and the Administration's Prohibition policy.
Democratic Dry Senator Harris of Georgia, hearing that one commissioner was dickering for a four-year lease on a Washington home, threatened to withhold the commission's expense money unless it ceased its secret activities. Exclaimed Senator Harris: "Every enemy of Prohibition is in favor of the commission . . . acting behind closed doors and conducting their deliberations for years." He demanded a report from the commission to justify its existence.
While the commission maintained its gravelike silence, one of the commissioners, U. S. District Judge Paul John McCormick, returned to his Los Angeles home for the holidays. There, "speaking as an individual," he gave an interview on the commission's work, in which he saw two major problems—Prohibition enforcement and "governmental lawlessness." Deploring the search of private homes by Dry agents without warrants, he observed :
"It is a gross misuse and denial of constitutional rights of citizens and a menace to life and property. A man's home is his castle and the practice of entering it for Prohibition enforcement, without recourse to legal procedure, should be abolished."
Despite the fact that Judge McCormick had lately sat on the U. S. bench in Manhattan, had there issued many a Dry padlock order against Broadway night clubs, Senator Harris cried: "Just what I feared! . . . An encouragement to violations of the law. . . . A partisan against Prohibition unfit to hold office on the commission. . . . Prohibition forces will be greatly disappointed if the President does not remove this man. . . ."
Senator Borah, arch-campaigner last year for Herbert Hoover, swerved off in a new direction when he contributed this statement to the growing discussion:
"I'm not deeply concerned about a report from the commission. . . . If it should report, it will not tell us anything that we do not know. . . . The only thing is to find the kind of officials who will enforce the law. . . . It will never be enforced by the present personnel from top to bottom. I'm more interested in officials . . . than in the theories and dissertations of the commission."
The "top" of the "present personnel," Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon, had not had a good night's sleep for a week before the Borah blast. It was not the problems of Prohibition that kept him awake, however, but rough seas in the Bahamas whither he had cruised aboard the yacht Vagabondia. Putting in to San Juan, Porto Rico, Secretary Mellon got some rest at a hotel.