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NE thing prohibition has done: Liquor has been removed from the streets and highways of the country to such an extent that in more than twenty-five thousand miles touring from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Canadian border to Mexico-hundreds of miles along the south line-I, a roaming stranger, have seen none of the drinking. Before I could discover liquor, whether brewed, distilled, or fermented, I had to search for it; and even the indications, the signs of clandestine liquor traffic, are so indistinct and difficult of recognition that one must become practiced in his observations in order to recognize them.

Since prohibition went into effect I have been through places and across regions that I knew twenty years ago, during years before the idea of prohibition was anything but a joke and drys "queer birds." Let me say offhand that a traveler could not then cross the United States or go anywhere in the country and not find himself constantly beset by liquor and constantly witness its effects on men and women. Twenty years ago a man going seven thousand miles across New York, Pennsylvania (through Erie), Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming (through Cheyenne), Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana would see hundreds of places with music and bright lights and pullers-in reaching for customers for the tables and bars. And last autumn and this spring I went this route by automobile, and on all that journey, of more than seven months, liquor nowhere displayed itself. I did not see many men obviously under liquor's influence. I was not asked to take a drink even

once.

Liquor is the most elusive game imaginable on the highways. Like elk or deer or mountain sheep, it can be found, but one must know the signs, must know the regions where it hides and ranges, and it is dangerous game, for those who watch its preserves are apt to be surly and suspicious, questioning one's motives in seeking it. Not only is liquor deadly, but one may be regarded as an enforcer of the law, and killed, or at least assailed, or fled from even though one's intentions are as dishonorable and illegal as possible.

Last autumn and twenty years ago 1 went through moonshine regions of Tennessee, and on the Mississippi at Memphis. In 1902 L went the length of the Ohio River. In Knoxville, Tennessee-well, in no part of the land could a man walk unchallenged,

BY RAYMOND S. SPEARS

uninvited, even unassailed by the votaries of liquor in those old days. It flaunted itself even in the dry States, if one was white. Now even a rotund old fellow with some geniality of appearance and rather sociable in his ways goes from end to end of the United States, and the only place where any one ever asks him to witness liquor in its bottles is in his home town among people who know him.

On my travels twenty years ago, wandering into industrial regions, through feud lands, from corn belts to cotton bottoms, from timber jobs to mining regions, from hunting camps to trappers' cabins, from fly-fishing brooks to commercial fishing lakes— everywhere was liquor. State laws but slightly veiled its distributers and hardly awakened the doubts of venders or consumers.

And now liquor simply is utterly invisible from the highways. One must know what illicit liquor does to an automobile, to a building, to a town, or to a locality to see where liquor is "working." Consider Memphis, on the Mississippi. Twenty years ago from the shanty-boat colony on the slough to its busiest street in the cheerfulest corners liquor obtruded itself on men, women, and even children. To-day a man can walk every street in Memphis in the sunshine, and go unchallenged by liquor. The sign of liquor is in the murder record of the city; liquor can be found in road-houses; it can be discovered in its wretched sunless dens. But the stranger who does not know where it is may go far and snoop much before he can put his lips to the glass. Arrests of automobile drivers for intoxication are frequent in Memphis, but let me say I did not see one car in hundreds that, on the great drive or in the streets, seemed erratic from liquor. The wild alcoholic revelries of the highways may exist now, but not with curtains up and visible from the street.

We crossed Arkansas from Memphis to Little Rock. Two villages were dejected and surly, perhaps because of blind-tiger or moonshinebootleg operations. South from Little Rock, which seemed not to be overly thirsty, we went through the southern Ozarks. Here, down approaching the Texas line, we came at night to a village where at least a dozen men were hilarious. We heard a moonshiner and a bootlegger talking in their lingo, not dreaming we could understand their talk of "pig" and "tied up" and "got out." And we saw two bottles in a single package handed over. By a coincidence, the sheriff and a posse

three days later took more than a dozen stills in this very neighborhood, about southeast of Hot Springs, as I remember. That was the only "hilarious" place, visibly so.

Shreveport showed peace and good will. There is an atmosphere about a drinking town that is unmistakable. A neighbor of this Louisiana city had the hard and suspicious bearing of unrestrained but covert liquor trade.

Across Texas conditions of illicit liquor traffic did not obtrude themselves. At Houston one is introduced to this or that man, and later the explanation is made that "he's a bootlegger." One sees no drunken men. He meets men who had a drink last week, or are going after a drink next week. Nobody invites one out to have a drink. It costs too much. In Galveston, which in the old days was a terrific town, three or four outlying resorts "have all kinds," but neither the automobile drivers nor the pedestrians show general consumption of liquor.

In none of the towns of Texas, on a 1,200-mile circle segment from Marshall to El Paso, were there any open or flagrant indications of liquor. Two or three small places did show the earmarks of being sapped in vitality by illicit liquor. In one of these several men had the bearing of being "lit up." But even here the blatant, boastful, insolent, and aggressive habit of liquor known so well in the old days was absent. The drinkers had a furtive, rather anxious, and even dreading air. And I may say that of all the violators, I know of only three or four anywhere who even maintain a semblance of carelessness in their bearings.

Liquor has shrunk from the communities of the land. The casual passer-by through Texas, through any New Mexican town, sees no indication of it except in about two out of a hundred communities. Main Street is rid of liquor. In the old days, if three or four men gathered in a hotel in a town, even on a street corner, the first thing was, "Let's go have a drink." The only time this happens now, judging from my own experience, is when personal friends foregather, and one of them, knowing of the meeting, will bring a bottle. Strangers in New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, and even in California, are not asked to "have a drink."

There is some liquor along the border. No one denies that quite a few drinks are brought across. The amount, compared to consumption in

the old days, is trifling. The Ku Klux Klan has settled the liquor question as regards selling to Negroes, and though one meets ranchers, merchants, and cowboys-all those types supposed to be wallowing in bootleg-he may hear about liquor, but it isn't forthcoming.

In Nebraska and Iowa one can dig up a little bootleg talk. He may even hear how dreadfully "real nice people" are carrying on at Cedar Rapids, or Clinton, or North Platte. But it isn't a spectacle visible from the street. Indeed, the only part of the Lincoln Highway from Cheyenne to Chicago where the liquor traffic intrudes itself on the passer-by is in Illinois, west of Chicago. There the great transcontinental automobile highway is seen to be used in liquor transportation. If one knows the signs, one sees them.

The bootleg expression is plainly marked on all those engaged in it. The mark is as plain as the brand on Cain. All over the United States, and I have been automobile touring in more than twenty-five of them since prohibition came, the bootleg brand is the same. What is that mark?

Ask any motor-cycle cop, stand for a time with any town marshal, go into any bootleg thoroughfare and watch the cars going by. Watch the people in the streets. Recognition becomes curiously inevitable. But to put the description down in words is difficult.

No better place for becoming familiar with the bootlegger's appearance can be had than on the main thoroughfares out of great cities. The very best place in the country west of the Hudson is just west of Chicago on any of the several good roads. In one town the motor-cycle cop talked with engaging frankness.

"They drive big cars, and one man sits in the leading car, with the cases loaded around him. Behind him comes another car, loaded down with men, all with their guns-"

"For the police?"

"No-o, not that. But for hijackers -booze robbers, you know."

Fear makes the liquor runners drive fast. They go forty miles an hour, say. They don't slow up when meeting other cars-one sign. They have the hard, set faces of violators. They make quick stops, with screaming brakes. They may have new, beautiful cars, but the cars are apt to be untidy and carelessly driven. They draw up to certain gasoline pumps, where stores, garages, and gloomy soft-drink roadside businesses stand, none of them showing much business activity. None of the outfits are easy under scrutiny. Curtains are apt to be up, caps or hats drawn down to hide features, collars turned up, and the license numbers are generally bedeviled, plastered with mud or spattered with paint, tar, or other veil.

If one watches the automobile traffic for a few hours where there is bootleg traffic, certain outfits stand out prominently. Down the Mohawk Valley, down the highways into New York City, across New Jersey, out of Boston, east and west between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, around Sandusky, and between Toledo and Detroit, any one can soon learn to distinguish the illicit traffic. And the places where the traffic finds its customers, the hotels, the soft-drink places, the drug stores, the restaurants, the tailor shops, the candy stores-they cannot keep from showing the signs of their wretched and clandestine trade. The signs are not all legal evidence. The place of ill feeling may photograph exactly like an honest business; but the police, the prohibition agents, the sheriff's appointees, newspaper men, and the drinkers all become familiar with what they know is but a hunch, for they cannot often trace the identification to positive indications.

But liquor, the work of liquor on its drinkers, can be found only by hunting for it and watching for it. In hundreds of communities it does not obtrude itself upon any one. That much prohibition has done for the country. I drove my two sons and my wife seven thousand miles last winter, and before that eight thousand miles on a round trip from coast to coast, and in all that distance there wasn't any place that would invite any of us in to have a drink.

Tell me the country is wide open? I've seen twenty thousand miles of highways, from San Diego to Portland, Maine, since prohibition came, and in all that distance I have been invited into just two blind tigers. A lot of my friends are patrons of bootleggers, at that. They can find it. They do find it, but they have to hunt for it,

Tell me conditions are "worse than ever"? I tripped the Mississippi; I rode a bicycle thousands of miles; I drove a motor cycle through a dozen States; I walked and skiffed and railroaded from the St. Lawrence to Alabama, and from New York City to western Dakotas. I was a reporter in New York City and up State, and traveled for magazines and went on my own, gathering data, notes, experiences, for my writing before the country "went dry." I know what conditions used to be. I've had liquor come at me in a dozen States in the old days, where now it is utterly furtive and invisible.

Now, going alone to look towns over, up and down, on back streets and down main streets, of country hamlets and of great cities, I can find the blind. tigers. They tell me right in my own town there are from eighty to one hundred bootleg joints or venders,

that our prohibition enforcers are "making a million." But I can walk the streets of my town and not see ten drunks in six months, when in half an hour before prohibition came I saw and counted thirty-odd in fifteen minutes. And, with my eyes open, I drive tens of thousands of miles and see no drunken men, and the pitiful dejection or recklessness that is the mark of illicit liquor on property and community and individual appears only at long intervals, and one must know it to recognize the sign.

The boy and girl who "go to town" or away from home do not find the camaraderie of wide-open saloons waiting for them when they are lonely. The movies, lunch-rooms, and churches. await them. Let me remark that the chances are nearly ten to one that a stranger will now be asked to go to church rather than to have a drink. And in the automobile camp-grounds, which are found in most of the towns strung along the automobile trails like the Lincoln Highway, the National Old Trail, the Mohawk Trail, the Chicago-New York, and other familiar automobile routes, the tourists ask where restaurants, or groceries, or motion pictures may be found, and rarely seek liquor. A few do sometimes ask caretakers where liquor can be found. But for one such a hundred ask for "sights," churches, good places to eat. Almost no one even thinks of liquor.

And the traveler twenty and ten years ago had trouble finding good places to eat. Many a time I have found in cities that the free-lunch counter was the only or the best meal, with a glass of beer inevitable beside one's plate. In even crossroads hamlets of the land now short-order places are found, and every town has its eating-place for the passer-by. They do a thriving business where they couldn't survive the saloon free-lunch competition in liquor States, or even in blind-tiger States. In my own town, of 12,000 inhabitants, there were sixty-seven saloons before prohibition, and not one restaurant-a hotdog wagon alone survived free-lunch competition. Now there are three or four excellent lunch-rooms and restaurants, doing a good business, in spite of alleged eighty or ninety bootleggers.

Tell me prohibition isn't working? If it isn't, why don't we see the liquor game played everywhere, instead of only furtively and at rare intervals? Drive from ocean to ocean, from border to border-ten or twenty thousand miles. The stranger will not see liquor in any form. It has vanished from sight. The stranger takes his life in his hands if he tries to find it, so afraid is liquor of being found out. Compare that with legalized sale!

F

IVE newspaper correspondents were the first to apprise Calvin Coolidge that he was President of the United States. I was one of them. We did it at one o'clock in the morning of August 3, 1923, by the flare of an ancient kerosene lamp, in the primitive farmhouse of his father, John C. Coolidge, atop the Green Mountains, in Plymouth, Vermont.

The circumstances, abounding in tragedy, pathos, and sweetness toothe last contributed chiefly by Mrs. Coolidge-were these:

At 12:30 A.M. the telephone bell tinkled behind the desk of a tiny hostelry at Ludlow, Vermont.

A yawning night clerk of eighteen years, clad only in trousers and undershirt, answered the call. Three newspaper correspondents, also yawning, in the lobby, were about to seek their couches. The sleepy clerk shouted from the booth, "Is Mr. Roy Atkinson, of the Boston 'Post,' here?"

Mr. Atkinson replied, "Here he is." "Boston wants you," returned the tousled-headed lad, who held the wire. Mr. Atkinson hurried to the phone. He was in the booth barely a minute. Then he called to us, "Boys, President Harding is dead!"

"Oh, we heard that report last night, and the night before. Who says he is dead this time?" asked James A. Hagerty, veteran political writer of the New York "Times," and myself in duet.

"Secretary Christian has wired the news from San Francisco. It is official," answered Atkinson.

"Well," we agreed, "it means we must awaken Mr. Coolidge and tell him he is President. You know he has no telephone nor telegraph wire 'way up there on Plymouth Notch," I suggested.

The hamlet was asleep. The only available motor-car driver slept. The sole telephone operator was asleep.

President Coolidge was presumably dreaming in the "shack" just across the street from his birthplace, fifteen miles away, up a dark, stony, serpentine mountain path.

How to get the news to him of President Harding's death and give the people of the United States and the world the first message from the new President was our job.

One of us awakened the motor-man by telephone and directed him to bring his fleetest car around. Another awakened the combination station agent and telegraph operator. A third routed out of bed the girl operator who had exclusive charge of the single telephone wire to the region outside. She was ordered to commandeer

BY LOUIS J. LANG

every wire she could appropriate in New England and hold it open indefinitely.

The motor car, of the vintage of a quarter of a century agone, rattled up to the hotel door. Then it occurred to Atkinson that two of our comrades were in bed. We yanked them out in their pajamas. They started to dress.

"Dress in the car-the President is dead! We are going to tell the new President about it!" shouted Atkinson and Hagerty in the same breath.

Our comrades grabbed trousers, coats, and shoes, dashed down the stairs, and joined us in leaping into the car.

"Step on her till she busts!" yelled Atkinson to the chauffeur.

The aged boat wheezed, rocked, jerked, and lunged. We were off up the mountain. That drive seemed all but eternal and interminable in its length and anxiety. The car backfired and shook, crunched rocks, stalled. It careened about road elbows at forty miles an hour. The dim searchlights scarcely punctured the Egyptian gloom.

One minute our heads thumped the top, another we were thrown to the floor by impact with the bumps which Vermont road-makers had not leveled. Toward the end of the journey we came to a full stop.

"Let's get out and run," quoth an impatient passenger.

"Oh, yea; the President will send us back in his limousine!" was the sarcastic remark of another.

The chauffeur, a former schoolmate of the President's father, said: "Don't be so foolish. Keep your seats; we are almost there."

Painfully laboring up the last series of precipitous hills, we suddenly shot into an open space. Then we narrowly escaped climbing a tree which we had seen the then Vice-President nursing early the day before.

We caught a glimmer of light. "That's in the President's combination dining and sitting room. Father Coolidge always keeps an old kerosene lamp burning, because he gets up before daylight to milk the cows," said our ancient pilot.

We drew up at the porch of the Coolidge farmhouse. All jumped out. Except for the dim flame just described, the house was an inky blot. Atkinson and I crept onto the porch, on which we had sat with the President-to-be and Mrs. Coolidge the previous morning. Atkinson fumbled for the bell. It could not be found.

"There ain't no bell. We are all honest here. Oh, they don't lock up at night any more than in the day.

Walk right into the house," said our bus pilot in a loud whisper.

Atkinson pushed open the door into the mite of a room where the Plymouth Rock lamp sputtered. The Coolidge collie pup barked. “Who is there?" was the husky inquiry from the adjoining room.

Atkinson, who recognized the voice of Father Coolidge, answered: "The newspaper men. President Harding is dead. We must see your son at once."

There was a swish of clothing inside the father's bedroom. Then appeared the aged father of the President. He wore a nightgown tucked into a pair of overalls. His feet were bare. Rubbing his blinking eyes, Father Coolidge said: "Just had a flash from somewhere about it. I'll call Calvin and Grace."

The Plymouth Nestor climbed the stairs to the bedchamber of his son and daughter-in-law. He had hardly mounted the first step when, with a pant and a roar, a motor car stopped outside the door. A breathless, dustbegrimed man rushed into the dingy living-room. "Where is President Coolidge? Tell him President Harding is dead. I have a message from Secretary Christian. I am from the Vermont Telephone Company. I must see the President at once!" he gasped.

We informed the telephone man that Father Coolidge had gone to awaken his son and daughter, and would return soon.

Lights began to gleam through the narrow staircase, at the top of which the President and the future mistress of the White House were presumably dressing. There was a rustling of a skirt. There was a shuffling of shoes. Hours seemed to elapse. We correspondents were wondering if the President ever would come downstairs; whether, if he came, he would violate his reputation for taciturnity; whether, if he did, we could ever reach a telephone or a telegraph station in time to catch even an extra edition of our papers.

One-thirty A.M.!

A girlish, brown-haired figure, attired in a simple dotted Swiss gown, came slowly down the rickety, squeaky stairs. Her face wore a sweet but saddened expression. The woman seemed stunned. It happened that the writer was nearest to the bottom of the staircase when Mrs. Coolidge-for it was she-walked into the room.

Addressing the writer, Mrs. Coolidge said: "It cannot be true! There must be some awful mistake. Poor Mrs. Harding, I do feel so sorry for her! She has been so hopeful, so brave, so loyal and devoted."

.Admonished that the news was only too true, the President's wife added: "We are both shocked. We can hardly believe it. We had been assured that President Harding was on the road to recovery. We are simply astounded by the sudden tragedy."

The telephone despatcher handed Mrs. Coolidge this mutilated message, signed by George B. Christian, secretary to the dead President. It was dated San Francisco, August 2, 7:35

P.M.:

"The President died instantaneously and without warning, and while conversing with members of his family, at 7:30 P.M. (11:30 P.M. New York daylight saving time). Death apparently was due to some brain evolvement [this word, through an operator's blunder, read "environment"], probably an apoplexy.

"During the day he had been free from discomfort and there was every justification for anticipating a prompt recovery."

By the sputtering little lamp Mrs. Coolidge read the message, which had been addressed to the new President. She turned to the writer and said: "That word 'environment' should read 'evolvement.' That means embolism. That means a clot of blood on the brain, the same thing that is reported to have caused the death of former President Roosevelt. Isn't it pitiful?" "You have no telephone or telegraph service here. We shall gladly wire your message to Mrs. Harding at San Francisco," I suggested.

Mrs. Coolidge expressed her gratitude. She went over to the center table, took up a bit of paper, got a pencil, and wrote:

"Mrs. Warren G. Harding, Palace Hotel, San Francisco, Cal.

"We offer you our deepest sympathy. May God bless and keep you.' (signed) "Calvin and Grace Coolidge."

The writer asked the privilege of then taking the message along. Mrs. Coolidge replied: "Please wait until the President has seen it."

Just here there was a step on the stair. There came from the bottom of the flight an apparition in black. A white face was silhouetted in the flutter of flame from the single lamp. It was the face of the new President. It was ashen in hue. This was intensified by a suit of black, a black tie, and black shoes. The habit had been substituted for a much rumpled gray suit the new President had worn the morning before, when he sat upon the porch swing and exchanged with the correspondents felicities that President Harding was out of danger.

The new President strode silently, almost majestically, into the room. He greeted each of us with a hand-shake. We each addressed him as "Mr. President."

The new President's keen eyes searched ours as if for information.

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International

Approaching the President, he said, in solemn dignity: "Mr. Coolidge, you are the President of the United States. We bring you the sad news of the death of Warren G. Harding."

He

The President's face grew even more pale, were that possible. waited a full minute. Then he asked, "Is that absolutely authentic?"

"Absolutely," replied Mr. Atkinson. Mrs. Coolidge then handed the President the message from Secretary Christian. As he leaned over the table and scrutinized the official report, the President's face grew even sadder. He stoically read and re-read the message. Then he dropped it upon the table. Speechless, he stood for still another minute. Then he turned to Erwin C. Geisser, his acting secretary. With dignity and precision, he said: "Mr. Geisser, will you please come with me into the other room?"

The President and Mr. Geisser started for the room on the left. Father Coolidge had dug up another greasy, flickering lamp. He preceded the President with it. The three disappeared. The door was closed.

Nearly 2 A.M.! Not a line from the President for the many millions who awaited it.

Two-fifteen A.M.! The door opened. The President reappeared with a few

sheets of paper. He walked quietly over to Mrs. Coolidge and handed them to her. "Grace," said he, affectionately, "please read this and tell me what you think of it."

Mrs. Coolidge carefully examined the manuscript. She handed it back to the President. She smiled and said, "I think that is fine, Calvin."

The President was about to turn toward the impatient correspondents when Mrs. Coolidge said: "Wait a minute, dear. I want your opinion of this message to Mrs. Harding."

The President read it, handed it back, saying, "That is a very sweet note, Grace."

Mrs. Coolidge gave the message to the writer to wire.

Meantime the President, still silent to the correspondents, handed them individually this, his first message to the American people:

"Reports have reached me that President Harding is gone. The world has lost a great and good man. I mourn his loss. He was my chief and my friend.

"It will be my purpose to carry out the policies which he has begun for the service of the American people, and for meeting their responsibilities wherever they may arise. For this purpose I shall seek the co-operation of all those who have been associated with the President during his term of office.

"Those who have given their efforts to assist him, I wish to remain in