Word: smooting
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Protests against the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill banked higher at the White House last week. Requests for a veto continued to flow in. Henry Ford stayed overnight with President Hoover to repeat his belief that the bill was "an economic stupidity." Albert Henry Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank of New York, conferred long and solemnly at and after luncheon. Many another tycoon flayed the measure in public or prepared to protest when (or if) the bill should come formally before the President...
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...
Confused at this adverse tariff turn, Senator Reed Smoot, in charge of the bill, marched back to conference, where was patched up a second compromise under which only the President would have power to flex rates on specifications (limited to 50% up or down on the substantive law) supplied by the Tariff Commission...
Guilty consciences are revealed in some of the pronouncements of the Republican leaders. Their own words imply that the Smoot-Hawley bill is in general a pretty bad hodge-podge of log-rolling and special pleading, and the new flexible provision is offered as the only hope of improving the bill. Unfortunately for the sincerity of the memory of some of our Congressmen, it may be recalled that almost the identical eulogies of the flexible provision were offered in 1922. Yet the intervening years have not shown much in favor of the innovation, in large measure because of the personnel...