Three days after President Hoover had pledged his administration to the Constitution in general and the 18th Amendment in particular, Mrs. Charles Hamilton Sabin resigned as New York's Republican National Committeewoman. Her reason: "I want to devote my untrammeled efforts toward working for a change in the Prohibition law." Her friends awaited developments, well knowing that the slim, smiling, brown-eyed wife of Manhattan Banker Sabin did not drop, without finishing, what she took up. Last week came some developments:
Fifty women, representing 17 states, met in Chicago, formed the Woman's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Mrs. Sabin, leading spirit, was chosen chairman. The purpose: to enlist five million women to fight Prohibition, to favor Temperance.
Charter members of the W. O. N. P. R. included: Mrs Pierre Samuel du Pont (Delaware), Mrs. Ralph Martin Shaw (Illinois), Mrs. Meredith Nicholson (Indiana), Mrs. Lothrop Ames (Massachusetts), Mrs. Edward Stephen Harkness (New York), Miss Agnes Repplier (Pennsylvania), Mrs. Paul Fitz Simons (Rhode Island), Mrs. George Orvis (Vermont). Like Mrs. Sabin, Mrs. Orvis had left the Republican National Committee to be free to fight Prohibition.
Said Mrs. Sabin: "Every bit of spare time I have for the rest of my life will be given to this cause."
Politicians, reading the Organization's first manifesto, paused to ponder these words: "We deplore the evident hypocrisy of many of those who hold or seek public office. Too often it is cynically assumed that so far as the Volstead law is concerned a man's acts need not conform with his votes. We believe in exposing such hypocrisy, because such men are unfit for any public trust."
Often enough has one politician threatened to tattle on another's wet-dry habits. Never has an organization, especially of women, set out officially to expose such public officials.
Speaking for the U. S. Drys, Consolidated, Dr. Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Public Morals, characterized the W. O. N. P. R. with this sneer: "A little group of wine-drinking society women who are uncomfortable under Prohibition."