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Dr. W. Well, it will have to wait until the campaign is over.
Two days later, quizzed again on the Willebrandt matter as he emerged from Nominee Hoover's office, Dr. Work said: "I am chairman of the Republican National Committee and I have conferences every day with Mr. Hoover."
In Chicago, which seemed to be Mrs. Willebrandt's base of operations, the subject grew exciting when she appeared in town and registered at the Blackstone Hotel. She would see no one, until after a two-hour conference with James William Good, Hooverizer of the West, and Walter Newton, Chairman of the G. O. P. Speaker's Bureau. Emerging she was asked point-blank what her auspices were.
Turning, she said: "I think that I will let Mr. Newton answer that for me."
Mr. Newton squared off and replied: "Mrs. Willebrandt certainly has been speaking under the auspices of the Speaker's Bureau of the Republican National Committee."
So that settled that. In Washington, Nominee Hoover repeated to the newsmen that he "would rather not discuss" the matter at all. A Southern speaking tour was arranged for Mrs. Willebrandt, on Nominee Hoover's heels through Tennessee later this month. She was also scheduled to speak next week at a State convention of the W. C. T. U. in Kokomo, Ind. Mrs. Willebrandt returned to her duties as Assistant Attorney General in special charge of Volstead violations. While she deplored the position she found herself in, she said: "I suppose it is inevitable. I am sort of a personification of Prohibition."
Mrs. Willebrandt was not alone in the public eye. Newshawks penetrated to the village of Lomita, suburb of Los Angeles, to interview and photograph a schoolteacher named Arthur F. Willebrandt, 40 years old, with a pompadour. Court records show that Arthur F. Willebrandt divorced "M. Elizabeth Willebrandt" in 1925. The disguised name was Mrs. Willebrandt's idea. Mr. Willebrandt's grounds were amicable. He charged desertion after they had been separated some eight years. She did not contest the suit.
In 1910, Arthur F. Willebrandt was superintendent of a high school in Buckley, Mich. Mabel Elizabeth Walker was a girl of 21, teaching lumberjacks' children in the Buckley primary school. She had gone to Michigan with her parents from Kansas, where she was born in a sod hut on the prairie.
Soon after the wedding, Mr. Willebrandt's lungs necessitated a move to Arizona. Mrs. Willebrandt nursed him and did all the housework. She had vitality enough left over to take a normal school course in Tempe. After his health returned, she left him. She became a school superintendent in Los Angeles and studied law at the University of Southern California. Her reputation grew with her work as Public Defender of Los Angeles—charity advocate for beaten wives and fallen women.
In 1921, scouring the country for a woman lawyer to put into his sub-Cabinet, President Harding heard about Mrs. Willebrandt in such glowing terms as only California's Senator Hiram Johnson knows how to use. President Harding feared she was "too young" (32 years) but appointed her.