Prohibitionists name attorney as candidate
Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Claude A. Watson, formally notified of his nomination as the National Prohibition Party’s presidential candidate, today called for a fight against governmental bureaucracy and extravagance and against the “strongly entrenched liquor power.”
His acceptance speech was the first political platform to be announced officially by a 1944 presidential nominee.
The Los Angeles attorney said:
Today we find the liquor power again strongly entrenched, in legal and quasi-legal partnership with government everywhere. It is the same old liquor power, the same liquor traffic, but in even more insidious form than when the righteous wrath of an aroused nation sounded its death knell.
Mr. Watson described his platform as a “four-square” stand and urged an end to “overlapping, liberty-destroying bureaucracy” and demanded “real economy” in government.
Calling for freedom of individual enterprise and an end to government competition with private business, he said his party was still opposed to establishment of monopolies of trade and wealth.