Word: smoot
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...said he would (TIME, June 23), President Hoover last week signed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill. To write the necessary 13 brief words he used six gold pens, which he presented to the conferees on the bill: Senators Smoot, Watson, Shortridge, and Congressmen Hawley, Treadway, Bacharach. During the ceremony, from which photographers, newsgatherers and cinemen were excluded, Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, four of the conferees, Collector of Customs Francis X. A. Eble and the President's three private secretaries, stood by at solemn attention...
...Adopted (44 to 42) the conference report on the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill...
Chief objector to the Hawley-Smoot bill was the motor industry whose enormous foreign trade speeds many a factory wheel. Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., General Motors president, summed up the industry's basic argument thus: "The economic position of the U. S. has completely changed during the past two decades. We cannot sell unless we buy. Additional restrictions in the way of raising the height of the tariff wall are bound to have an adverse influence on our domestic prosperity through reducing our ability to produce. . . . The failure of the tariff bill would have a helpful influence...
Labor. The American Federation of Labor supports the Smoot-Hawley bill on the theory that it will keep out the products of cheap foreign labor. Matthew Woll, A. F. of L. vice president, bitterly attacked Henry Ford for his tariff opposition, citing the fact that the motorman had moved his tractor plant to Ireland, where he makes his machines at 60% of the U. S. cost and imported them to this country duty-free as agricultural implements. But labor was not unanimous. George L. Berry, president of the International Printing Pressmen's Union of North America, last week flayed...
Reprisals. The threat of foreign tariff reprisals alarmed big exporting industrialists as much as the prospective disruption of the world trade cycle. Thirty nations have filed 161 specific protests against items in the Hawley-Smoot bill. Canada, best U. S. customer, has made a provisional upward revision of its tariff which would adversely affect 25% of the goods imported by the U. S. and give British imports a much higher preference rating. Cuba was moving in the same direction...