Evening Star
- DRY AGENTS USE SMOKE SCREEN TO HALT REVENUE CHIEF; 4 FIRED
- STORY OF WOMAN WITNESS ATTACKED BY HALL DEFENSE
- NIGHT CLUB'S BOOTHS WILL BE DOORLESS
The Evening Star's front page for November 6, 1926, led with a Treasury embarrassment: prohibition agents had stopped Charles R. Nash, assistant commissioner of internal revenue, as he returned from a fishing trip, and the Treasury responded by forcing out its chief enforcement officer in Washington, firing three agents and warning dry agents nationwide against such tactics, while the dismissed men vowed to fight for reinstatement. An Associated Press dispatch from Somerville, N.J., followed the Hall-Mills murder trial as defense counsel cross-examined Mrs. Mary Demarest about seeing defendant Henry Stevens in New Brunswick the morning after the killings. Closer to home, Washington police held back a license for the new Valencia night club until it took the doors off 16 booths around its dance floor.
Translation
DRY AGENTS USE SMOKE SCREEN TO HALT REVENUE CHIEF; 4 FIRED
Charles R. Nash, assistant commissioner of internal revenue, was stopped by a group of prohibition agents while returning from a fishing trip recently and so treated by these agents that the Treasury has not only obtained the resignation of its chief enforcement officer in Washington and dismissed three other prohibition agents, but has broadcast to agents throughout the country sharp warnings against similar tactics. It was learned at the same time today that the three agents who were discharged and Livingston intend to make a fight for reinstatement.
STORY OF WOMAN WITNESS ATTACKED BY HALL DEFENSE
COURTHOUSE, SOMERVILLE, N. J., November 6. - Trial of the HallMills murder case was resumed today with Mrs. Mary Demarest on the witness stand for continuation of cross examination. Clarence E. Case of defense counsel [?] began questioning her concerning the story she told yesterday of having seen Henry Stevens, one of the three defendants, in New Brunswick the morning after the slaying of Rev. Edward Hall, New Brunswick church pastor, and Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills, choir singer in his church.
NIGHT CLUB'S BOOTHS WILL BE DOORLESS
Issuance of a license to Valencia, new night club at 711 Thirteenth street, was accorded this morning after the management of the club had removed the doors of 16 booths which fringe the dancing floor in compliance with the directions of Maj. Edwin B. Hesse, superintendent of police, who inspected the premises and then declared that he would approve a permit to open if the doors were removed. The scheduled opening of the club last night was postponed because the Police Department held up the necessary license.
Context
Why dry agents answered to the revenue service in 1926
The article links a prohibition incident to the Bureau of Internal Revenue because federal dry enforcement was then organized as a revenue function. When the Prohibition Unit was first established in 1920, it was placed inside the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the Treasury, so an assistant commissioner of internal revenue such as Nash stood above the field agents who, according to the Star, stopped him on the road. Overall direction came from Lincoln C. Andrews, who had become Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in 1925 and was in charge of prohibition enforcement. That structure was about to be replaced: a law enacted on March 3, 1927, created a separate Bureau of Prohibition alongside a Bureau of Customs. The Nash affair and the firings the Star reported therefore took place in the final months of the arrangement in which dry agents were, administratively, revenue men.
How Andrews's Treasury disciplined its field force
The Nash affair landed in an enforcement service that its leadership was already trying to purge. Andrews treated prohibition as strict law enforcement rather than a dry crusade, and in 1925 he immediately reorganized the unit, laying off numerous senior agents; that summer the 48 state enforcement districts were replaced with 22 federal prohibition districts. The field force he inherited had been hired without Civil Service examinations, which left room for politicians to appoint cronies, and agents earned only $1,200 to $3,000 a year, a scale at which many accepted payoffs from bootleggers. Dismissals were common: by 1930, 1,587 of 17,816 federal prohibition employees had been fired. Against that background, the Star's report that the Treasury secured one resignation, fired three agents and sent sharp warnings to agents across the country shows the same top-down discipline being applied to how agents treated a senior official. The details of the stop itself, including the smoke screen in the headline, rest on the Star's account.
How the 1922 Hall-Mills killings reached trial in 1926
The murders of the Rev. Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills dated from 1922, and the original investigation that year produced no indictments. The case revived after continued speculation in the New York Daily Mirror, fueled by comments from a man associated with one of Mrs. Hall's housekeepers, led Governor A. Harry Moore to order a second investigation and a trial in 1926. Hall's wife and her brothers were the accused, and the trial opened on November 3, 1926, at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville, three days before this dispatch. Mrs. Demarest's account mattered because it placed Henry Stevens in New Brunswick within hours of the killings; later in the trial Stevens testified that he had been fishing miles away that night, and three witnesses corroborated him. A sighting the next morning would have tended to undercut that defense, which helps explain why counsel attacked her story. The case drew vast nationwide newspaper coverage unusual for a local murder, which helps explain why a Washington evening paper carried the AP report on its front page. The jury acquitted all three defendants on December 3, 1926.
What oversight Washington police exercised over dance venues
The Valencia story shows the Metropolitan Police deciding whether a night club could open at all: according to the Star, the department held up the club's license until Maj. Edwin B. Hesse inspected the premises and required the doors to be removed from 16 booths around the dance floor. That kind of supervision belonged to the moral policing the department practiced in the 1920s. Its Women's Bureau, led from 1919 by Mina Van Winkle, counted among its initial responsibilities 'girl welfare work' and the supervision of movie theatres, dance halls and similar places. In 1925 a Police Department order forbade 'indecent music,' and Van Winkle was asked publicly to explain what the phrase meant. The door order fits this pattern of watching over conduct in places of entertainment, although the article states neither the reason for removing the doors nor the legal basis on which the license was withheld.
Original
DRY AGENTS USE SMOKE SCREEN TO HALT REVENUE CHIEF; 4 FIRED
Charles R. Nash, assistant commissioner of internal revenue, was stopped by a group of prohibition agents while returning from a fishing trip recently and so treated by these agents that the Treasury has not only obtained the resignation of its chief enforcement officer in Washington and dismissed three other prohibition agents, but has broadcast to agents throughout the country sharp warnings against similar tactics. It was learned at the same time today that the three agents who were discharged and Livingston intend to make a fight for reinstatement.
STORY OF WOMAN WITNESS ATTACKED BY HALL DEFENSE
COURTHOUSE, SOMERVILLE, N. J., November 6. - Trial of the HallMills murder case was resumed today with Mrs. Mary Demarest on the witness stand for continuation of cross examination. Clarence E. Case of defense counsel [?] began questioning her concerning the story she told yesterday of having seen Henry Stevens, one of the three defendants, in New Brunswick the morning after the slaying of Rev. Edward Hall, New Brunswick church pastor, and Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills, choir singer in his church.
NIGHT CLUB'S BOOTHS WILL BE DOORLESS
Issuance of a license to Valencia, new night club at 711 Thirteenth street, was accorded this morning after the management of the club had removed the doors of 16 booths which fringe the dancing floor in compliance with the directions of Maj. Edwin B. Hesse, superintendent of police, who inspected the premises and then declared that he would approve a permit to open if the doors were removed. The scheduled opening of the club last night was postponed because the Police Department held up the necessary license.
Source: Holding institution