506 From Clerk's Desk to the Presidency president of a corporation with the manifold, brain-torturing problems arising out of a few hundred thousand miles of wire, 340,000 employees, and 16,000,000 subscribers, to say nothing of a couple of billion dollars in assets. It was a hot day, too. man in the not-too-cool explosively demand why he was annoyed a second time with the same mistake. With a quiet laugh he explained the similarity of the names, as if it were a good joke, and helped his puzzled and not too - cool caller back to the switchboard, and thence to his man. Nor did he call his switchboard operator back then and ask her what in the name of the great, extended telephone wires of the universe she meant in twice ringing in the same not-toocool mistake on the wire of the executive vice-president -who was slated to be president—of the world's greatest public utility. It was a hot day; somebody had to be cool, however. But this young need not be written in volumes. What seemed unusual to the caller, who inquired the name of the helpful man, was only Mr. Gifford's usual method. It was that quiet, discerning manner that won Theodore N. Vail, who, while head of the corporation, frequently called upon Gifford for figures which, when produced, THE YOUNG MAN'S DAY? Two schools of philosophy have generalized in recent years upon the young man's chances of success in business, politics, art, literature, and science. One school contends that this is a "young man's world," that all fields seek youth and reject age, and that the pace of modern life quickly eliminates the man of years. Another school contends that modern life in all its branches has become so complex and specialized that the chances of an early success are diminished They cite the usual examples -Hannibal, Clive, Napoleon, the younger Pitt, Alexander Hamilton. Yet, it would seem that there is just as much chance of early success now as in other ages and generations, and while general conditions may have their effects, the man himself has much to do with his own success, or lack of it. A few examples: Walter S. Gifford, the subject of this sketch, is President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company at 40. Owen D. Young was Chairman of the Board of the General Electric Company at 43. S. Parker Gilbert was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury at 27. Eugene O'Neill was winning Pulitzer prizes with his plays when he was 30, and many other young men and women have had similar successes in art and literature. A long list of forty-year-old bank presidents and financiers could be made up. But so, too, could a long list of men of years be compiled, headed by the name of E. H. Gary, chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, and George F. Baker, who, at 85, is still Chairman of the Board of the First National Bank of New York, and one of the country's active financiers. It does not seem particularly a young man's world or, in view of the more and more active part taken by the women, a man's world at all. In those few seconds of fleeting time this non-explosive gentleman had flung his friendly voice over miles of blistering wire, into a sweltering telephone booth, and had turned a hot, tired, irritable human being into a friend. He soon forgot it, but his new friend did not, which is the way of such friendships. sometimes altered the entire policy of the company. For Gifford is of the new school of business. He created for the telephone company that system of accounting and statistics now so essential to every business, a system substituting accurate charts of business knowledge for groping and guesswork. He innovated the idea of selling bond issues to subscripers, thereby creating good will. So, his figures and his philosophy of being helpful to all, from his superior officers to a not-toocool, not-too-pleasant telephone caller, have carried him, at what is now considered a tender age in the business world, to the presidency of the world's largest public utility. Twenty years ago a lad who had finished his Harvard course in three years, taking a clerical job with the Western Electric Company; now head of the telephone business, not only because of abilities and qualities, but also because of a personality, which, though dynamic, is And that is the story of Gifford. It also non-explosive. Prohibition As It Is III. ST. LOUIS--THE DRY SOUTH-WASHINGTON A BY ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT FIGHTING anti-prohibitionist, Mr. James C. Espey, came to luncheon with me in St. Louis and told of a thrill he had enjoyed while local secretary of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. As narrated before a House committee at Washington and recorded in a Federal document, the story runs thus: Our Association found a drugstore in St. Louis which was selling a good deal of booze and narcotics and was doing a good deal of harm. We therefore appealed to the local prohibition enforcement officers. We got no help. We then appealed to the AttorneyGeneral of Missouri. He lent us some detectives. One of them went into that drugstore and stayed for some time, and then later they pretended that they wanted to buy the place, so that they might get some information for the law-enforcing officers, and they got an option on the place. They found that the bootleg stuff and the narcotics were being sold by the head of the Anti-Saloon League of Missouri, and he is the man that gave the option on the property, and he had to run away to avoid prosecution. The Anti-Saloon League has vindicated itself by installing as his successor a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. H. H. Post, but Mr. Espey mentioned certain oddities of prohibition that cannot be so readily discounted. "In the main," he said, "prohibition enforcement is entrusted to the same police officials who were unable or unwilling to enforce the liquor laws which it supplanted. If they failed to enforce mild laws, how can we expect them to enforce this drastic law? When you agitate for a modification of this drastic law, you are opposed by five whole classes-the politicians, the doctors, the druggists, the bootleggers, and the Protestant clergy." Speaking of the doctors' affection for the Volstead Act, he said: "This is the first law that has ever underwritten a profession. A young doctor is sure of $1,200 a year from his prescription business, and there are young doctors in St. Louis who do nothing but write prescriptions; they hang around poolrooms looking for customers. "How can the manufacture of liquor be stopped when it is so easy? You can take an ordinary coffee percolator, attach a rubber tube, and behold! the apparatus will produce pure alcohol. "Think how we used to fear the Federal Government! It could take away our sugar or make us endure heatless Mondays and we were afraid to rebel. Since prohibition, who is there who really stands in awe of the Federal Government?" As we were finishing our luncheon, I asked why I had seen no drunkenness in St. Louis. "Because you haven't been down in Market Street," he answered. But I had, and now I told him so, adding, "All the way from the Atlantic seaboard to Kansas and then here, I have been counting drunken men. They haven't averaged one a day, even in the roughest parts of big cities. I haven't seen drunken men in trains. Before prohibition every smoking car seemed to have the same drunken man in a back seat, singing. He is gone." "Come down to Market Street right now," he replied, "and I'll show you some." So we prowled all though that street of "flop-houses," labor agencies, and grogshops. Turning back, we tramped 508 The Home of "Mountain Dew" Not a the whole length of it again. drunken man could we find. But "hope springs eternal," and there remained the levee. Eight big Mississippi steamboats were loading and unloading when we reached it. On the curb in front of the former saloons (and one or two not yet extinct) sat a long row of black roustabouts. All were sober. But at last -at last! just as we were coming to the beautiful, weblike span of the Eads Bridge, a black man swung toward us staggering. There are 2,200 saloons in St. Louis. There are drugstores selling whisky over the counter and drugstores with back rooms where men and women drink together. A leading hotel serves whisky in cups. At another hotel and at a famous restaurant, hip liquor is allowed. Within a single year there were ten killings directly attributable to prohibition and ten more resulting from quarrels in saloons. A man in a hotel lobby said, “If you had been with me last night you would have seen twenty-three men drunk, right in this house." But in two days I saw only three men drunk on the street. THE CAREFUL LIQUOR SELLERS HE St. Louis saloon-keepers are wary. A stranger is given a bottle of near-beer-"Sorry, sir, but that's all we've got"-though a man next him is drinking highly alcoholic beer and another is sipping a highball. I found saloon-keepers wary even in Market Street. At the office of the Anti-Saloon League Dr. Post complained that many church members appeared to side with the liquor gang. At Prohibition Headquarters, the Divisional Chief, Mr. Goshorn, said that the gang was strongly organized. Until a year ago it maintained a protection association which paid the fines of members. It still pays spies to watch the six enforcement agents allotted for fifty-one counties-half the State of Missouri. Evidently Mr. Goshorn's army of six now and then receive help from an in teresting source, for I read in a morning paper: G. H. Foree, alleged paid Ku Klux Klan prohibition raider, who led a number of Klansmen in making wholesale raids in Poplar Bluff, Mo., on Aug. 4, was arrested yesterday in Wellston, St. Louis County, on an indictment charging him with impersonating a prohibition officer. Across the Mississippi from St. Louis lies the little city of East St. Louis, Illinois, amply supplied with saloons which sell beer to any stranger. In one of them the bartender said, "This is the only saloon in East St. Louis that doesn't sell whisky." Also there is a thriving trade in crocks and kegs, and I saw large shipments of grapes. I added one drunken man to my collection. "The police have got tired of raiding and leave it to the Volstead officers,' said a newspaper man; "but don't be too hard on this town-we have more foreigners than we can manage, and bums come here from St. Louis." waited over at a junction-North Vernon, On my trip to Louisville, Kentucky, I Indiana. Having just read an account of prohibition at Gary, Indiana, I expected to find the state rather wet. The dispatch, wired from Chicago, said: Fifty-two men and women charged with violating the prohibition law in Lake County, Ind., were held to have "substituted for prohibition a system of license which protected them from conviction" by the U. S. Court of Appeals here to-day. The defendants included Roswell Johnson, former mayor of Gary, Ind., and Louis Barnes, former sheriff in Lake County. An explanatory dispatch from Indianapolis said: Defendents in the Gary liquor conspiracy case were sentenced in the Federal Court here on Aug. 28, 1923. The case grew out of the Agnes Szabo, "Queen of the Bootleggers," trial in 1921, when deputy constables testified that "a system existed in Lake County by which whisky confiscated from the bootleggers was divided among the officers of the law or sold and the money divided." Nevertheless, citizens at the railway station assured me that North Vernon was bone-dry. "Not a drop anywhere in town," they declared. "Bootleggers never come here." Of its buildings, one has been transformed into a chicken hatchery, another consists only of foundations and a few strewn bricks, still another is being torn down, and the largest, with its windows smashed, is marked for demolition. Federal Enforcement When I asked the reason, they said, "The Klan." No one greatly fears Volstead agents. They are a known peril, whereas the Klan is mysterious. Then, too, it is believed that Volstead agents can be bought off, whereas no one cherishes a hope of buying off the Klan. As an institution for enforcing the dry law, where it wishes enforcement, the Klan is unequalled. Arriving in Louisville, I asked a stranger, "How is prohibition here?” and he answered, "Judge Moreman has six hundred cases." These were violation cases, which had accumulated during the judge's prolonged absence. "Sixty-five per cent. of all the red whisky in the United States was being made in Kentucky when prohibition went into effect," said the reformer, "and now, if you ride from Bardstown to Bardstown Junction, you will see what were once the foundations of half a dozen big distilleries, and around Bardstown you will see half a dozen more. This doesn't look very much as if the liquor men expected whisky to come back, does it?" Those who do not wish to see prohibi- The whole question of enforcement of Louisville has no Scotch. It has no gin. It has no wine. It has no beer. It has no saloons. What remains of the once-thriving liquor traffic is a secret trade in "mountain dew" and an occasional defiance of prohibition by a "soft drink parlor." Judge Moreman sends violators to Atlanta by the carload. One shipment had a chartered car all to themselves. There are 300,000 people in Louisville, and until prohibition came the place was renowned for its distilleries. The Rev. H. H. Mashburn, an official of the Anti-Saloon League, took me to see one of them as it is now. Its grounds occupy both sides of an unusually long block. At the Henry Watterson Hotel I was presented to Mr. Claude Graham, known the country over for the whipped-cream egg-nog which he formerly dispensed all the year through at the bar. In the same room this celebrity now presides over a "coffee shoppe." Louisville is a city of churches and theological seminaries. theological seminaries. It has a population almost wholly American. But in its submission to Volsteadism it appears to have required vigorous persuasion. As I was informed by Mr. Sherman Ball, United States District Attorney, a first offender convicted of making or selling liquor is imprisoned for three or four months if he pleads guilty. If he is convicted on trial, the penalty is imprison 510 North Carolina's Methods ment for six months. A first offender convicted of possessing liquor may be fined as much as $500. RED WHISKY SAFE IN BOND for a 'little boy.' Within a single month we caught five cars, each carrying 200 gallons, and all belonging to the same people. But there isn't a place in Knoxville where you can buy a drink; it's all Mtor, said: "Nine tenths of the red R. MILLER, the Prohibition Direc- pocket trade." whisky of the United States is in Kentucky distilleries under bond. When When prohibition first went into effect they were robbed, but we sent seventeen men to penitentiaries, and there were no more robberies. Just to-day a Kentucky brewer, pleading guilty of making illegal beer, paid a fine of $1,000 and was warned that a second offense would mean Atlanta. As for bootlegging, it is indulged in only by the criminal class, and yet there are a hundred places in Louisville where liquor can be bought." As mementoes of his agents' exploits among the mountaineers, Mr. Miller treasures eight captured shotguns-big, double-barreled ones, quite disturbing to behold. While in Louisville, I read of prohibition as enforced at Lexington, Kentucky, where "better coöperation between the Federal and local authorities, imposing jail sentences instead of fines, sealing leaks from bonded warehouses, and the application of the padlock law are curtailing the liquor traffic." From Louisville, I went to Knoxville, Tennessee, and there I read: "Official announcement that all found guilty of driving automobiles while drunk would have their drivers' license suspended for a year was made to-day by Judge Robert P. Williams of the Municipal Court." On the wall behind Judge Williams's chair in the courtroom hangs a prisoner's striped suit as a warning to sinners, and he shows the visitor a large closet filled with half-gallon fruit jars containing captured whisky. "Runners are hired by the wholesalers to bring these fruit jars from the mountains," he said. "The wholesalers decant the stuff into 'big boys' (pint bottles) and 'little boys' (half-pint bottles) and sell it to the bootleggers, who peddle it at two dollars for a 'big boy,' a dollar Who are the consumers? An occasional automobile accident sheds some light on the question. Says Judge Williams, in his latest report: A number of the cases coming into my court are members of the best families of Knoxville. While they do not state the same openly in court, yet frequently they come to me and say they were at a social gathering where a fruit jar was passed around and the wreck occurred while returning home, with the result that they were brought into my court on the charge of being drunk and driving a car. According to the Prohibition Director, Mr. Wynn, moonshining in the mountains is decreasing: "Union County, one of the worst moonshining districts three years ago, has been practically cleaned. up, and sentiment is changing everywhere. Preachers and teachers in the mountains have helped to change it. When we began here, only one mountaineer would give evidence against moonshiners. He has since been elected sheriff." When I asked about drinking at the University of Tennessee, he said, "The university is bracing up." VOLSTEADISM AND ETIQUETTE I NEWSPAPER man with whom I student paid his way through the university by bootlegging," he told me, "and there is still too much drinking there and among our young men in general. They think it no discourtesy to bring flasks even when their hostess is an ardent prohibitionist. However, men of thirty and more are beginning to swear off as a health measure, for the mountain dew' we now get is ruinous." In Charlotte, the first citizen I met began his account of the situation there by saying: "We have magnificent hardsurface roads running back into the mountains, and numerous cross roads. So down comes 'mountain dew' in fruit jars." |