100 years ago in Spokane: Elizabeth Poindexter’s latest column led to an ineffective teetotaler outcry

Elizabeth Gale Poindexter’s columns about Washington, D.C., social life continued to stir up a ruckus.

After Poindexter (the wife of Sen. Miles Poindexter of Spokane) wrote that booze flowed freely at many D.C. parties, a self-appointed group called the Spokane Citizens Committee wrote to the Anti-Saloon League and asked, “What are you going to do with Mrs. Poindexter’s charges? Are the powerful and the rich to escape the law, while the poor are forced to obey? No coat of whitewash can hide the fact that a senator’s wife has indicted Washington official society.”

This was a bit on the hysterical side. Poindexter’s column hardly “charged” anybody with liquor possession. She merely pointed out, in a tone of bemusement, that the Prohibition laws were flouted as often in Washington, D.C., as anywhere else.

The Anti-Saloon League responded to the Citizen’s Committee’s demands by pointing out that they would require specific charges and actual data to take any action.

From the fishing beat: The fishing season was about to open, and the Spokane Daily Chronicle ran photos of four prominent Spokane men, resplendent in their fishing gear. One of them was Henry M. Hart, principal of Lewis and Clark High School.

“There is only one way for the truant school boy to touch a soft spot in the heart of Principal Henry M. Hart … that is to say he has been fishing,” the Chronicle wrote.

The paper said two of Spokane’s city commissioners were “constantly in dispute” over who was the fishing champion of the city council.

R.J. Stephens, a prominent grain dealer, declared that “all work and no fishing make poor business man.”

He was photographed holding his hands 2 feet apart, “an estimate of how long they’ll be at the other end of his line tomorrow.”