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More drastic and determined was Herman Preston Paris of Clinton, Mo., the Prohibition Party's 1924 candidate for President. Mr. Paris said it might even be best to submerge the entity of the Prohibition Party and join forces with the Republicans to ensure Smith's defeat. Mr. Faris said: "The party at last has reached one of its goals—that of making Prohibition the major political issue before the voters of America."
Next to take the battlements for the Dry cause was the Jefferson-Lincoln League. Its president, one James A. Edgerton of Washington, called for a national convention in Chicago simultaneous with the Prohibition convention. A Jefferson-Lincoln League ticket was to be nominated and plans made for cooperating with the Forces of Reform.
The Asheville, N. C., conference and the Richmond, Va., convention called by some Southern ministers who carefully explained that they were acting as laymen and not as church officials (TIME, July 9), did not rouse enthusiasm among potent Democrats. The latter were, if anything, made more indignantly firm in their political faith by a curious development which these Southern stirrings took. Governor Moody of Texas joined Josephus Daniels in avoiding the Asheville conference. "I am a Democrat," he explained. "I do not believe in bolting the party." This remark brought forth a tirade from Mrs. Clem Lawrence Shaver of West Virginia. Mrs. Shaver is the high-strung wife of the chairman of the National Democratic Committee. She "works hard at little things" and delights in making public her personal opinions, regardless of how they may conflict with her husband's commitments. In August, 1924, she loudly flouted the Democracy's nominee for the Vice-Presidency because he, Charles W. Bryan, had opposed holding National Defense Day. She is chairman of the West Virginia division of the National Women's Democratic Law Enforcement League and in that capacity she last week cried out:
"Regardless of what Democratic leaders from top to bottom may do, we dry Democratic women will not support the dripping wet ticket and the joke platform named by the Tammany delegates. . . .
"The idea of men like Josephus Daniels, Joe Robinson, Carter Glass and Jed Adams* saying 'I'm a Democrat—I shall support the party nominee!'
"We say a man who will shut his eyes like an ostrich to the things which the Democratic Party has always stood for is a 'booze-o-crat,' not a Democrat.
"The Democratic nominee . . . stamped himself as a charlatan and a faker who is attempting to prove that Lincoln was wrong and that you can fool all the people all the time. . . ."
Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wife of Governor Smith's nominator, answered Mrs. Shaver: "There are women, of course, who consider the enforcement of the Volstead law more important than truth or fair play."