(2 of 2)
Last week Mr. Pratt was in the blinds of his South Carolina plantation, "Good Hope," near Ridgeland, hunting wild turkeys. In New York, Mrs. Pratt declared that the story might be "all perfectly true" as far as she knew. Mr. Pratt's lawyer insisted that no case lay against his client because the purchaser of liquor cannot be punished under the Volstead Act, because there was no evidence of smuggling against him. Said the lawyer: "Mr. Pratt did just what you or I or anyone with money enough to do so and a desire to buy liquor, would have done."
What brought the Pratt affair to the surface were the tattlings of one Ernest S. Braidwood, a Customs agent discharged for 'legging who joined with the Anti-Saloon League of New Jersey to block the reappointment of Col. Arthur F. Foran as Comptroller of Customs in New York. Rev. James K. Shields, the N. J. League's local chief, procured from Braidwood an affidavit which he forwarded to President Hoover as an argument against Col. Foran's reappointment. The League opposes this official because in 1928 he was reputed to have said that he would vote for Hoover as Federal jobholder but that he preferred Smith as a Wet.
But the League's zeal against Col. Foran apparently overreached itself. Its hirelings in search of liquor and gambling evidence raided the Foran hunting lodge at Mt. Airy, N. J. They emerged with photographs of a bar, a cash register, beer barrels, gin bottles. They found no liquor, no slot machines. New Jersey's Republican Senators Kean and Baird, incensed at the League's "chimneysweep" tactics, rose up to demand that the President reappoint their man Foran to office on Feb. 1 when his present commission was to lapse.