Smoot on Smut

Friends of that high-minded Mormon, Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, were startled last week to learn how he was spending his holidays. Thoroughly, searchingly he was reading salacious books, one after another. Carefully he was blue-pencilling the most lascivious passages, turning down pages for future reference.

It was duty, of course, not preference which prompted the Senator's actions. Against his will, the Senate had heeded the plea of New Mexico's Harvard-taught Senator Bronson Cutting, and by amendment removed from the Tariff Bill a provision under which Customs agents could censor imported literature. As ammunition to make the Senate reverse itself in the name of public morals, Senator Smoot had obtained from the Customs Bureau 40 of the "rawest" foreign volumes which had leaked into the U. S. Excerpts from these he was prepared to read to the Senate as concrete arguments for censorship. He would ask for a secret legislative session, unheard-of since the Senate moved from Philadelphia to Washington. If he did not get it, he would let the Senate blush in public at what he was determined to read to them as samples of "foreign filth."

Exclaimed Senator Smoot: "The Senate will be so shocked by these books that it will all but unanimously strike the Cutting amendment from the bill."

To newsmen, Senator Smoot showed some of the more unprintable things he had discovered and assured them that he already had the support of several colleagues, including Indiana's Watson, the G. O. P. floorleader, who had perused several of the books with shocked attention.

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