Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-02-14
lin" REED SOON TO ANNOUNCE
HIMSELF FOR PRESIDENT IN 1882
Wet Candidate Said to Be-
Iieve Nomination Can
Be Achieved.
Expected to Hit ,Raskob on
Financial Control of
Democratic Party.
BY FREDERIC WILLIAM VILE.

BY FREDERIC WILLIAM VILE.
Special Dispatch TO The Star.
KANSAS CITY, Mo, February IA
Jim" Reed is a candidate for Presi-
dent. In. due course his hat will
be in the Democratic ring. Any time
from now on, the country may ex-
pect to hear it pitched there with
a bang designed to challenge ma
tional attention. The occasion will
be carefully chosen and psychology
cally timed. When it arrives, it will
become amply apparent that the re-
vived ambitions OF the raucous raven
of the Kaw to return to public lie are
not concerned, as popularity thought,
with the United States Senate, which
he So long adorned. 1t is exclusively
in the direction OF the White House
that Jim Reeds blue eyes now are
turned.
The arch foe of Woodrow Wilson and
Herbert Hoover believes that this presi-
Dental future lies upon tne crest of the
wet wave that swept over the North,
the East and the Middle West last
November Reed lays claim to a sort
of proprietorship in the enti-prohibition
issue, founded in priority. He was
storming the heights of Volsteadism,
he says. aeons before Franklin RooSe-
welt. Richie or Buckley were identified
with it in the public mind. Indeed,
long before the eighteenth amendment
was written into the Constitution. Reed
was battling on stump and busting to
defend the personal liberty" All along
the "Hindenburg line" which ramified
from st. Louis famous breweries
through the corn belt, Jim for years
left his fello E-countrymen in no doubt
where he stood on the prohibition issue.
He was against it always.
At the Houston Democratic Conven-
ton in 1928, when Missouri's favorite
son shifted a chance to be compromise
candidate, Reed f1irted momentarily
with the ass-Moody- Roper-Thomp-
son-DanielS faction which sought to
wiring some of thu wetness out of the
party platform. But the episode left
"Jim's" anti-prohjbition soul unseared
Today, if he could, he would obliterate
national prohibition lock, stock and
barrel He probably is States
rignter" and not far from the Dwight
Morrow position.
His Big Business Role.
Re DIS Kansas City friends, and their
name is legion, think his presidential
style is cramped bit by a policy almost
as near and dear to him as the wet
cause, viz, his anti-monopoly attitude.
Jim" is conscious that warfare on
privilege" and the interests" is always
good campaign stuff. With power
bound to be an issue in 1892. he con-
ceives that anti-monopoly might be
almost as good a talking point for a
White House aspirant as repeal or
revision. But Reed is also aware of
the Democratic partys burning desire
to divest itself of the reputation of
being inimical to big business. He is
too Shrewd and old hand at the game
not to know that presidential candi-
date against whom the hand of high
finance is raised travels at last under
handicap. One of the first blasts
that Al Smith caused to be blown from
the ramparts in the Summer Of 1928
was that business should place no faith
in Republican insinuations that a
Democratic administration would mean