Before the 18th Amendment was adopted the Drys were on the sensational side of the Prohibition argument. Effectively they dramatized the evils of liquor, exhibited homes broken, lives wrecked by the Curse of Drink. The Wets, on the defensive, got poor publicity. Adoption of the 18th Amendment reversed the positions. The Wets took to the attack, sensationally dramatized the "failure of Prohibition," exhibited the law's breakdown, stressed bloody methods of enforcement. As defenders of the system their own efforts had brought to pass, the Drys lost something of their old aggressiveness, found themselves fighting with blunt weapons.
Last week the U.S. Drys, Consolidated, began to present their evidence to the House Judiciary Committee against pending resolutions to repeal the 18th Amendment. Like everyone else, they knew the resolutions had only the remotest chance of passage, but the committee hearings had put them in a position where they had to rebut the voluminous testimony of 45 Wet witnesses piled up before the committee (TIME, March 10).
Stage Manager. To marshal Dry witnesses and their testimony was the work of Mrs. Lenna Lowe Yost, chairman of the Association of Organizations in Support of the Eighteenth Amendment, Washington agent (lobbyist) for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Able, smiling, determined, she stage-managed the Dry testimony from the wings of the committee room, sent her witnesses out to tell their stories, did not take the stage herself.
The Wets' chief attack on Prohibition had been that it was no benefit to industry and business, that no part of Prosperity was attributable to its influence. To combat this view was the prime purpose of Dry witnesses. In their zeal they went to what seemed unfair lengths by a counter charge that the Wets favored a return of the saloon. Hardly a Wet witness had appeared before the committee who had not specifically, emphatically, disowned the saloon as a liquor institution.
Statistics. Deprived of the more dramatic sorts of testimony they had used to bring in Prohibition, the Drys presented great masses of statistics to make their points. Over and over again the authenticity of these figures was indecisively wrangled by Dry witnesses and Wet committee members.
First to take the stand in defense of Prohibition was Samuel Crowther, business writer and investigator for the Saturday Evening Post. His major thesis: the prosperity of the past decade was due to Prohibition. His prime evidence: statements solicited from Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison, who, unlike Pierre Samuel du Pont and William Wallace Atterbury, did not risk the ordeal of crossexamination by personal appearance before the committee.
The Ford Message: "The Eighteenth Amendment is recognized by the men and women of our country, especially the women, as the greatest force for the comfort and prosperity of the U.S. I feel sure that sane people of this nation will never see it repealed or any dangerous modification."