PROHIBITION: Ladies at Roslyn

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Carry Nation, smashing bar mirrors to avenge her drunkard husband's death. Solidly and admiringly behind the Willard eloquence and the Nation hatchet stood the one effective feminine organization in the 19th Century U. S., the militant ladies of the tabernacle, the churchwomen. Times change. The ladies at Roslyn, last week, were of a different order. As a group they were more charming than churchy, handier with a mashie than with a hatchet, but most were mothers of families and all could raise respected if ineloquent voices in their communities. They claimed no divine guidance but they took seriously their membership in the National Executive Committee of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. They believed in Temperance but not in the 18th Amendment. Women had had no small part in putting that Amendment in the Constitution. These women were at Roslyn to help take it out. With hands which are usually busy knitting, Chairwoman Mrs. Henry Bourne Joy, a motherly soul who is president of the Needlework Guild of America and whose husband used to run Packard Motor Car Co. in Detroit, took up a pencil and rapped on a table for order. Her signal got the attention of a potent segment of the nation's womanpower. Down sat Virginia's Charlotte Noland, who controls fashionable Foxcroft School and her hunters with a practiced, efficient rein. With her was Mrs. George Sloane, a delegate to this year's Democratic Convention whose politics differ from those of her cousin David Ingalls, Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio. Georgia was represented by Mrs. William T. Healey of Atlanta, who operates her deceased husband's realty business. The wife of Anaconda Copper's President Cornelius Francis Kelley spoke for Montana. The wives of Pierre du Pont, who has his own Wet group, and William Corbit Spruance, du Pont vice president and director, spoke for Delaware. There were other able wives of able husbands: Hostess Moore who is married to a director of American Can and Lehigh Valley R. R.; intense little Mrs. Archibald B. Roosevelt; small, blonde Mrs. William Chapman Potter, whose husband is president of Guaranty Trust Co. For President ...? When the doors shut politely on the Press, prime business of the W. O. N. P. R. executives was brought on the carpeted floor: whom would the organization support for President? Certain Republican ladies reminded the group that it had been founded on a non-partisan basis. Democratic ladies recalled that the organization, prior to last month's conventions, had pledged support to the Wettest platform. But President Hoover had not yet confirmed his party's stand on Prohibition, the G. O. Partisans argued. It would not be good policy to base the final W. O. N. P. R. position on two platforms and one acceptance speech. The record was not complete. Nevertheless, the committeewomen had come to act, not temporize, and act they did. Fifty-one to 19 they adopted the following resolution: "While the President of the United States has no power to veto or change a proposed Constitutional amendment, he has through the prestige of his high office the power to wield directly or indirectly great influence over legislation.

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