Word: smooting
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...from an outright trade war, which would involve a series of trade reprisals by both sides. "Like real wars," says I.M. Destler, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, "trade wars tend to leave everybody worse off." Two years after Washington passed the virulently protectionist Smoot-Hawley bill in 1930, the wave of trade and currency reprisals that it provoked slashed U.S. exports by 60%, helping deepen the Great Depression. Japan's obsession with maintaining supplies of raw materials for its export industries was largely responsible for the Pacific adventurism that led it into World...
...locks the doors and windows and pulls the shades. Hypochondriac, jittery, paranoid, the economic system settles down to feed upon its own inadequacies. It sits in its slippers by the cold furnace and thinks about how well it used to make things, long ago. It disconsolately guzzles Old Smoot-Hawley, far into the night. Then it passes out. Another economy gone, as defunct as Mayan civilization...
What is wrong with protectionism? Americans for much of their history kept themselves snugly wrapped in protectionist laws. The famous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 set up the highest general tariff rate structure that the U.S. had ever had. One nation after another retaliated. The tariffs helped deepen the Great Depression worldwide and thus at least indirectly brought on World War II. Protectionists say that was an extreme case. No one wants to go back to Smoot-Hawley. Protectionists today want subtler, more modulated laws...
Justice may not have been blind, but it was probably seeing double. Jurors in the District of Columbia superior court had been deliberating a day and a half in the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl when Foreman Robert Smoot sent a note to Judge Fred Ugast. A decision was impossible, wrote Smoot, unless two jurors were replaced. In a corner of the note Smoot penned, "Drinking problem...
...Legend of the Bridge: Many years ago, in the 1960s, a Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity party turned into an argument over developing new systems of measurement. So they kidnapped one of their pledges--Mr. Smoot--and tied him to two-by-fours. They took him to the Harvard Bridge and measured the bridge in Smoots...