Word: smoot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Looking very pained at such language in the Senate, Senator Reed Smoot who himself has been making a study of obscene foreign literature to support customs censorship (TIME, Jan. 6), arose and began: "Oh, Mr. President?...
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...
...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...
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...
...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...