Life — August 23, 1928 — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

Meanwuice, Mrs. Mabel Walker Wille- brandt’s campaign against New York night clubs is having a great success from every point of view; especially from that of the Prohibition enforcement bureau's investigators. If Washington dispatches are correct, their expense accounts averaged more than $125 a night per capita over a period of several months; and there must have been some nights when they had to rest up. True, they charged the Govern- ment two or three times the current prices for drinks, but no doubt that can be explained away. The campaign was a blessing to the night clubs, too; for the boys who go to such places say that a good many of them were about to close anyway, with summer coming on, and they can pretty well afford to pay their fines out of the $70,000 of the taxpayers’ money that was left in them by the gatherers of evidence. © Deepest of all is the satisfaction that must be felt by the numerous persons who complain that Prohibition has fomented hypocrisy. For in New York (the most patriotic metropolitan cannot deny it) the business of evading the Volstead Act is still encumbered by a certain degree of ignoble precaution. You cannot get into a speakeasy, it is said, unless you have a card or the man at the door knows you. In Philadelphia, only ninety miles away, it is possible (or was quite lately) to stand on the sidewalk of a busy downtown street and look over the swinging doors at the customers lined up along the bar, just as in the old days before the nation embarked on this great and noble experi- ment. Mrs. Willebrandt’s Avenging Angels could not get around everywhere; so they punished hypocritical New York and left candid Philadelphia pretty much alone. Of course New York is Al Smith’s town and Philadelphia is Bill Vare's town; but it cannot be that that has any- thing to do with Philadelphia’s immunity. SSSGCOVEsS Some fliers cross the Atlantic, and some furnish entertainment to passengers on liners by getting rescued from the waves. But it was left for the Polish aviators, who flew round and round in circles off the Spanish coast till they had gone far enough to get to New York, to furnish a miniature picture of modern civilization. At last the human race commands enough power to carry itself a long way, if it only knew just where it wanted to go and how to get there. Elmer Davis. GOD SAVE THE COUNTRY FROM “TAMMANE-EE-E HALL |! The Harmony Boys A Nose for News “Q. When a young woman traveling alone is invited by a man whom she knows to lunch with him in the diner, may she accept the invitation with propricty?"* —"Good Manners’ query in New York Graphic. No. With alacrity. “Kenneth Harlan, Film Actor, Said to Have Been Seen With Wife.” —Portland Oregonian, “But,” added Mr. Dana, “when a film actor is seen with his wife, that’s news!” “Whether his connection is the natural out- growth of being a party to the alleged crimes for which he stands indicted, or whether he was instructed by officials of the society he repre- sented for so many years to become a party to the crimes that intimate information concerni the operations of groups that are believéd to i exacting large sums of money from keepers of liquor, vice and gambling houses for protection putposcs is the issue that will in all probability be determined shortly when an attempt is made to implicate him closely as part of the ring."* —Boston Herald. Stave: As clear as a political issue. “The Misses Doris, Agnes and Vivian Smith are spending several days at the home of their mother, Mrs. W. W. Lawrence. This is the first time in years that the community has had the pleasure of seeing the Smith girls in the altogether at one time." —Sidney (Ohio) Daily News. Anp very becoming it is, too. **Confections will be furnished to those who are non-smokers and refreshments of a more substantial mature to those who smoke, others who do not as well as to those who do both."* —Ravenswood (lll.) Citlten. WELL, we guess we'll go anyhow. comicbooks.com