Lion- Tiger-Wolf

Lion-Tiger-Wolf

(See front cover)

Manna, marmalades, and malt,

Sarsaparilla, sand and salt;

Mirrors, mitten's and powdered milk,

Skates, and skewers and beaded silk;

Bismuth; bladders, rough-hewn blocks,

Lenses, lentils and spiral locks;

Bone dust, eggs and ebony handles,

Skylights, matches and tallow candles;

Madder, miso, rattan mats,

Bricks and brooms and baseball bats;

Bibles, borax, strips of brass;

Garlic, gall nuts and frosted glass. . . .

Behind a high semicircular counter-like table, a dozen Republicans have sat long and heavily discussing these articles. Behind them hung a rich red curtain, imperially crowned with great loops of gold. Before them was a spacious oblong room with white marble columns, a high vaulted ceiling, huge full-length windows. Outside heavy double doors, securely locked, depended a small sign, bearing the gilt lettering: "Executive Session." A blackamoor has lounged at the entrance to enforce the sign. The sitters within were Republican members of the Ways & Means Committee of the House of Representatives, their heads together on the forthcoming Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill.

Public hearings brought into this room 1,200 witnesses in 45 days who gave 11,000 printed pages of evidence on changing the 1922 Tariff Act. Now, preparatory to the special session of Congress, the majority members of this committee were writing an administration bill which would fulfill the Hoover campaign promises. The President wanted tariff revision limited to agricultural products and a few special but unnamed commodities. These G. O. P. committeemen were inclined to give him what he wanted. But outside the locked door, potent U. S. manufacturers ululated demands that all duty rates be promptly and emphatically raised for their protection against foreign competition.

Complaints against the existing tariff law were:

1) Foreign producers, benefited by cheap labor, can still undersell the U. S. producer in the U. S.

2) Agricultural commodities compared with industrial products, are not sufficiently protected from foreign competition, with the result that farm imports lower farm prices in the U. S., help create farm surpluses.

3) Higher tariff rates would mean, in addition to a better protected domestic market, more revenue for the U. S. Treasury, hence, possibly, a reduction of U. S. taxation.

Against raising tariff rates to new levels were massed these arguments:

1) The more domestic products are protected, the higher is the cost of living. Domestic monopoly spells domestic extortion.

2) U. S. foreign trade will be injured by reprisals of countries whose chief products come into the U. S. over the tariff wall. Canada, best U. S. customer, has already complained. Cuba, worried over its raw sugar exports to the U. S., protested changes. If Argentine corn is more heavily taxed, that country's preference for U. S. automobiles, farm machinery, etc. might cease.

3) U. S. manufacturers use many imported raw materials. Raise the duty on these and the U. S. price rises accordingly. Soft drink producers are concerned at the prospect of added duties on sugar.

Democratic opposition to a G. O. P. tariff was still fluid. Alfred Emanuel Smith, in the campaign, had declared for a "compensatory tariff," to which many a Democratic Congressman heedlessly pledged himself. Tennessee's Democratic Cordell Hull of the Ways & Means Committee alone had raised a John-The-Baptist cry against Republican tariff plans. Hardly a Democratic Congressman but had some pampered local industry he would like to see "protected," ranging from women's shoes in Brooklyn to cane sugar in Louisiana.

But for all its diligence, a certain futility marked the tariff labors of the House Ways & Means Committee. A quarter of a mile across the Capitol grounds waited the man who in the end would leave the largest impress of authority upon this legislation --Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance.*The House writes tariff bills; the Senate Finance Committee chairman rewrites them.

Abraham Owen Smoot crossed the plains in 1846 with Brigham Young, was mayor of Salt Lake City when the U. S. Army descended upon that "nest of polygamous iniquity." To him by his wife Anne in 1862 was born a third child, a son named Reed. Ten years later Abe Smoot moved his Mormon household to Prove, 50 miles south of the Utah capital, there to start a woolen mill, to import the first beet sugar mill west of the Mississippi.

Under the shadows of the Wasatch Range, Reed Smoot attended the Brigham Young Academy, clerked in his father's store, worked in his father's woolen mill. A good Mormon, he believed that the sober labors of this life prepared for the life to come. Soberly, he subscribed to two New York newspapers of different faiths, read them comparatively for a year, solemnly concluded that only as a Republican could his business soul be saved. From that decision Reed Smoot has never since flinched.

Meanwhile his strength as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints waxed great. In 1900 he was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles which made him a sort of Mormon cardinal. Today by the rule of seniority only two men stand between him and the Presidency of the Mormon Church-- President Heber J. Grant and Chief Apostle Rudger Clawson. Someday Apostle Smoot may head his church and converse privately with God.

The Mormon Church is a business as well as a religion. Reed Smoot busied himself with its finances, pulled them out of a rut, made its beet sugar and woolen enterprises return good profits. His industry, in 1903, was rewarded with an election to the U. S. Senate.

There his reception was historic but not cordial. Upon his tall soberly garbed figure descended all the old righteous rage of the East against the Latter-day Saints. Christian pastors bellowed for his expulsion from the Senate. The ancient horrors of polygamy were dragged out and paraded before the world--despite the fact that polygamy had long since ceased to be a tenet of Mormonism. Humble and meek to a fault, Senator Smoot hung on against this two-year gale of religious disapproval, worked, waited, prayed. At the feet of Aldrich and Penrose and Lodge he became an apt pupil. His ascent to power in the Senate was steady and unspectacular. When North Dakota in 1922 retired Porter James McCumber from the Senate, Senator Smoot slipped his awkward frame into the chairman's seat of the potent Finance Committee--a legislative eminence comparable to the religious height of Mormon Apostle. Ever since he has dictated and executed the tax and tariff policies in Congress of the Republican administration.

In the Senate he has become "a lion for efficiency, a tiger for economy, a wolf for detail." No branch of the Government was too obscure for him to explore. The U. S. Bureau of Efficiency is his legislative child. But in the confusion of Senate debate, Senator Smoot gives no hint of his great influence. His voice is thin and quarrelsome. Senatorial badgers easily fluster him. He tries to smother them under a blanket of indisputable statistics, only to scold them for their mockery of his "facts."*

Now at 67 he is still tall and lean and lank, but dried and greyed by the years. A widower with six children, he resides in a magnificent marble house just north of the Connecticut Ave. bridge. The family home in Provo has long since stood shuttered and vacant, grass tall in its yard-- supposedly a symbol of the Senator's personal sacrifice in public service. His high poke collar with its white linen tie has given way to a lower softer neckdress, but there has been no relaxation in the grim stiff Smoot personality. From his indefatigability has sprung the verb to smoot.

Only three things break into the Senator's smooting: 1) vaudeville; 2) golf; 3) the Washington Zoo. For diversion this stern man went every Friday night to Keith's Theatre to sit in the second row just behind the orchestra leader and gaze over the footlights in unsmiling delight. Great was his sorrow when the theatre closed. His golf came at the age of 63. Now from 6 to 7 a. m. he plays a round on the capital's public links, shooting 110 in straight cautious jabs. At the Washington Zoo Senator Smoot liked to poke around among the birds and animals until Helen, a parrot, told him to "go to hell."

The Smoot feet, large and heavy, once almost created a diplomatic Incident when the French Debt Funding Commission returned to Paris to complain that Senator Smoot, a U. S. Commissioner, had comfortably rested his well-filled shoes upon their conference table. The catch word of that conference was France's "capacity to pay." At its conclusion a French Commissioner called upon Senator Smoot to bid him farewell, to ask if it were really true that Mormons practiced polygamy and if so, how they did it. The Senator replied: "That all depends upon--'the capacity to pay.' "

But there is a singing in the Smoot heart when a new tariff bill approaches. Here he finds his earthly happiness in absorbed Service to U. S. business.

No man voices more potently the demands for super-protection for U. S. industries and manufactures than Joseph R. Grundy, Bristol, Pa., worsted maker, cash collector extraordinary for the G. O. P. (TIME, Feb. 18). In Miami re- cently Senator Smoot was asked about tariff revision. Replied he: "I don't know. I haven't seen Joe."

The Senator agrees with Mr. Grundy that Prosperity can flourish and blossom only in the garden of Protection behind a high tariff wall. To cultivate that garden, to keep its wall in good repair Utah's senator is prepared to give his all. With dutiful zeal he pleads for high duties on sugar and wool. With the political zeal of a stalwart Republican he demands protection for--

Manna, marmalades and malt,

Sarsaparilla, sand and salt; etc.

*A "facts and figures" campaign speech in Philadelphia caused a good Republican audience, provoked by his schoolmarm manner, to boo Senator Smoot.

* Cover portrait drawn by Philadelphia Artist Vladimir Pertilieff.