Judge — October 9, 1926 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

JUDGE A Certain City HE Moderation League, as the newspapers will "Tiss informed you, has recently completed a survey of drunkenness in the United States for the year 1925. It finds that arrests for drunkenness, taking the country as a whole, are slightly above what they were in 1914 when the country for the most part was legally wet, but that in Chicago they are almost twice as great, specifically 92.871 as compared with 52,823. In New York City, on the other hand, a city about twice the size of Ch », there has been exactly the opposite tendency. The figures show 23,041 arrests for drunkenness in 1914 (less than half those for Chicago) and only 11,011 for 1925, less than half of that half. They are much less, for the latter year, than the figures for Boston or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Detroit, even smaller than those for Los Angeles, the heaven the Middle West, and hardly a bit those for Washington, our n: a twelfth its size. mal pride and a city All these other cities, also, with the exception of Boston, show increases over 1914, though none can touch Chicago's record. ry to 2 3 Hew ao you account for such a showing? New York, to our hundred percenters, is thc traitor among cities, in the traitor among States. It is as wet as the ocean; it has no local enforcement law; it reeks of “foreigners” and “nullificationists” and Al. Smith. What a place, to be sure! And yet in the matter of drunks it hasn’t a tithe of its quota. Is this, too, a sample of its un-Americanness? It occurs to us that there is a direct connection between New York’s indifference to Mr. Volstead’s injunctions and her figures for drunkenness. It will be argued, of course, that New York can’t be as strict in arresting her inebriates as her sister cities (which we don’t believe). But she is certainly as strict as she was twelve } go and she has more than cut her number in half, which is in itself a record. The only other large city that ap- proaches her in this respect is San Francisco, also a wet seaport full of foreigners. No, there is certainly a connec- tion here which may be epitomized in this simple sociological rule: The freer the town (from the Volstead complex), the fewer the drunks. se ee oe Wier about Chicago, the real subject of this piece and the butt of this particular number of JupGE (for which city we entertain only the kindliest regards)? If you have been reading the papers you will realize that it is not only in the matter of arrests for drunkenness that Dramatic Editor, George J Yet Chicago’s turbulence manifests its pre-eminence. one rarely hears a patrioteer anathematize Chicago as he does New York, for obvious reasons. Chicago is perhaps the most typical of American cities. She is the capital of that great empire of the Mississippi Valley which contains the bulk of our hundred percenters, which rules us politically and which is gradually but steadily imposing upon us its social and moral and religious standards. With all her foreigners Chicago is a true daughter of the Middle West, an intimate expression of its culture and its aspirations. If one can call her un-American then ditto corn-on-the-cob. But by the same token Chicago is also the victim of the terrible repressions that rule the Middle West. She is in fact the social voleano through which these repres- sions seek relief. Hence her condition of chronic eruption. It is not solely, or even largely, her fault that she picks 100,000 plastered citizens off her streets every year, or that she furnishes the battle ground for rival bootlegging gangs, or suffers from bandits or boy murderers or Carl Sandburg. Back of her, making such lawlessness inevitable, is the spirit of her hinterland as expressed in Volsteadism, in the Klan, in militant Fundamentalism, in all the taboos of a jealous and disgruntled yeomanry. She’s their safety valve. Thar she blows! A Close-up Je why Hiram W. Evans should continue to “strut his stuff,” as he likes to express it, in a full dress suit and a Pierce Arrow as the head of the dwindling Klan,when he might be in the movies enjoying the latest thing in dinner clothes and Rolls Roy it is hard to explain except on the theory that the man is a pure idealist. His talent for the movies is without a flaw, as he demon- strated before the recent annual klonvocation in Wash- ington. You may remember that he had just been re- elected Imperial Wizard by carefully planned spontaneous acclamation. We read on: These incidents were followed by a touching scene, illustrating how the head of the order influences his followers. Dr. Evans had referred tenderly and affectionately to his wife, a very comely, striking brunette several years his junior, with gentle manners and a soft, musical voice. He told the assembled Klansmen he had been guided by her wisdom and advice. After the election Dr. Evans caught his wife by the arm, escorted her to the footlights, and presented her to the audience. Then he repeated what he had said of her in his speech, and the crowd yellea from sheer joy. As the shouting died down Mrs. Evans turned to the Wizard, lifted her face and he kissed her. No doubt murmuring the while, “my best pal and severest critic!” W. M. H. comicbooks.com