Judge — July 11, 1925 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

a Sree res > uh EP Norman Anthony. Associate Editors, William Morris Houghton, William Edgar Fisher, Phil Rosa, Dramatic Editor, George Jean Nathan. De Joun T. Kincs grow on bushes? sea eae The question is prompted by the following announce- ment of William H. Anderson’s plans for his A.P.P.P.P.A.: “It will accept contributions only as outright gifts to William H. Anderson, its founder and General Secretary, to be used in any way he sees fit, to enable him to promote and further the objects of an ‘American Prohibition Protestant Patriotic Protective Alliance.’ ” ~ 4a eae Come on, you Santa Claus! William H. Gimme ] r. AnpERSON’S idea of starting a little private Klan of his own is not an original one. Simmons, with his Knights of the Flaming Sword, in Georgia, beat him to it. So did the plagiarist who founded the Knights of the White Cross Clan, in California. Doubtless there are others we haven't heard of, all offshoots of the Ku Klux and all diverting some of the loose dollars of hatred from the main stream. But to Mr. Anderson must go the palm for audacity of design. These other organizations sell you a member- ship and a nightgown and a few secrets. The . on the other hand, has but one member, m, and but one officer, Anderson, and he keeps all its secrets and spends all its money and wears its only nightgown, privately. He says he worked the whole scheme out in Sing Sing, We can well believe it. Slightly Passé? ut isn’t Mr. Anderson making a mistake? Granted the willingness of Americans to finance a zealot of his unblemished character, and no questions asked, isn’t he a little behind the times in his choice of a ballyhoo? Here's the Scopes trial filling the newspapers. ‘The talk is all of fundamentalism and of lepers who flirt with evo- lution. Why doesn’t he pick a live issue instead of wasting his time with his four P's, which will soon be as dead as free silver? Keeping Cool With Coolidge “Tus is a Government of laws, not of men. Please get that into your head.” Thus the late Mayor Gaynor was wont to admonish those who sought special favors at his hands or called upon him to abolish error and wickedness from the world. And when he said it, it was almost true. To-day, how- ever, with more laws than any other nation on earth, this is a Government of men, not of laws. The paradox is easily explained. We have on our statute books such a vast body of law, so much of it un- popular, that no human being or combination of human beings can enforce it all. Federal Attorney Buckner, of New York, has made that clear.’ Every officer of Govern- ment is compelled to choose the laws that he will enforce, and usually even the localities in which he will enforce them, letting the rest slide. Naturally, in doing so, he suits his personal taste and political convenience. Mr. Coolidge, for instance, plans to spend the summer at Swampscott, Mass. He knows that this will attract hordes of visitors to the North Shore, which is notoriously wet. He fears these visitors will go away with the impression that he and the Anti-Saloon League were not nursed from the same—er—container. So for the period of his stay, at least, he intends drying up that section of the country if it takes all his law enforcement machinery to do it. One may safely assume that in the meantime such laws as the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, the Mann Act, and even the Volstead Law west of the Alleghenies, will be honored more in the breach than in the observance. One may also safely assume that next year, if the Presi- dent feels he must go away for the summer, there will be an attempt to persuade him to return to Plymouth Notch. Where Are the Laws of Yesteryear? Y THE way, what has become of the Mann Act? You may remember that it made a felon of the man who drove, fetched, carried, pushed or persuaded a woman across State boundaries “for immoral purposes.” | We haven’t heard of a prosecution under it since it was used to “frame” E, Y. Clarke, former press agent of the late Ku Klux Klan. Can it be that concupiscence is no longer an American vice? As for trust busting, the very term has become archaic. Perhaps the Rotary has made boy scouts of our business men so that they need no more regulating. At any rate no serious attempt to enforce the anti-trust laws has been made since the war. Only recently the Supreme Court decided that trade associations, acting as clearing houses of information for their members, did not violate these laws. This in its own field is like saying that light wines and beer do not come within the provisions of the Eighteenth Amendment. The Sherman Law is evidently becoming a dead letter. Maybe the Volstead Law will follow suit when some fresh crusade, like anti-evolution, preoccupies the thou- shalt-not boys. Another year or two and the woods about the Summer White House may echo to the hunt, not of bootleggers any longer, but of heretics. W. M. H. comicbooks.com