LIQUOR Milestone

Having existed for 13 years, 10 months, 19 days, national Prohibition came to an end Dec. 5 at 5:32 p.m. E. S. T. at Salt Lake City when Utah became the 36th State to ratify the 21sat Amendment.

FACA

A thin-faced man with puffs of sandy hair over each temple perched on the edge of a table in the lobby of Washington's Mayflower Hotel one afternoon last week. Two other men leaned respectively against a piece of statuary and the wall. Thus was formed the first quorum of the newest of President Roosevelt's 15 major special governmental agencies--the Federal Alcohol Control Administration.

The man on the table was FACA's director, Joseph Hodges Choate Jr., 57, of Manhattan. His companions: Edward G. Lowry, special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, and Harris Willingham of the Department of Agriculture. Not present were: William Allen Tarver, chief counsel of the Department of Justice's defunct Prohibition unit, and Willard L. Thorp, director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Foreign & Domestic Commerce. These five were the officers of FACA's control committee.

Harris Willingham was the man who had drafted the distillers' code which President Roosevelt had just signed at Warm Springs. Under that code the liquor traffic was reborn to find that, as for 200 years past in the U. S., it was still not considered quite respectable, was still to exist only by sufferance.

The liquor trade was permitted to name a committee of ten, subject to Federal approval, to fix prices. But FACA could revise these prices, hold tight rein over all phases of the industry. Increase of plant capacity over Dec. 5 output was forbidden, except under special circumstances. FACA had power to control production and distribution through a quota system. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, under whose direction the liquor industry fell, had inserted a stipulation that the industry pay "parity" prices for its raw materials. In short, it was the code which most distillers had feared and hated and which they had no part in drafting.

If the liquor industry needed anything further to make it feel like an orphan, it came in a remark dropped by Secretary of Agriculture Wallace : "Liquor was legalized primarily as a revenue feature."

Hot on the heels of the distillers' code came the importers' marketing agreement. Article III of this agreement provided for minimum import quotas based on the peak years 1910-14, in which the U. S. bought overseas some 4,000,000 gal. of spirits, some 7,000,000 gal. of wine yearly. No restrictions were placed on the number of U. S. importing firms, but the total business was to be distributed by FACA according to "legitimate trade needs" of individual houses.

More than once President Roosevelt has hinted that he would use domestic consumption of foreign liquor as a blue chip in the international trade game. To this end the importers' marketing agreement was a notable innovation. What portion a nation would be allowed of the minimum import quota would probably be the business of the new Executive Commercial Policy Committee. Scotch whiskey imports might depend on pork and butter exports to Great Britain. The ECPC prepared for a haggle with France over apples and wine. But to assure an immediate supply of foreign liquor sufficient to discourage bootlegging, dikes were lowered for two months to let in up to 5,000,000 gal. of drinkables. Importers, who had applied for the entry of more than 12,000,000 gal., began to receive their allotments, but such was the general confusion that the first Repeal ships docked in New York with holds half empty.

If distillers were disappointed at the arbitrary treatment given them by the Government, they could at least find solace in the type of man set to govern them. No autocrat, mild-mannered Joseph Choate was prepared by socialite St. Mark's for Harvard (1897), by Harvard and his late great father for the world. His first grand view of it came in 1899 when Joseph Hodges Choate Sr. was made Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. In London young Choate served for three years as third secretary of Embassy. When he returned home he finished his law studies and now belongs to the Manhattan firm of Evarts, Choate, Sherman & Leon.

A specialist in constitutional law, Mr. Choate was an early foe of Prohibition on the personal liberty platform. He joined the Voluntary Committee of Lawyers, was made a member of New York City's Beer Control Board last May. When he heard that the New York State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board was contemplating prohibiting sales for consumption on the premises except with meals, he did what any libertarian scion of an old New York family would do. He wrote a letter to the Times prophesying that if such restrictions were enforced "those who want what they want when they want it will universally, instead of merely generally, as at present, carry flasks."

Further comfort to the vigilantly restricted distillers was Director Choate's opening pledge: "My personal interpretation of the President's purposes is that we shall have as little external control as possible." To reporters he modestly admitted: "You are talking to an ignoramus, almost lost in the complications of a big job."

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