"Gestures"

Tariff revision was perceptibly braked last week in the Senate Finance Committee. Republican revisionists on the committee seemed suddenly to have lost their ardor for "embargo duties." President Hoover was given "assurances" that the Senate's tariff bill would be held within the bounds of his desires. For this change in tariff tempo were four explanations:

1) Public opinion. Senator Reed Smoot, high-tariff chairman for the Senate Finance Committee admitted: "I have found very little demand for changes in the tariff. . . . Many of the heavy duties proposed by the House can be reduced without injury to industry."

2) Threats of tariff reprisals, in formal protests filed by 21 nations with the U. S. State Department against contemplated U. S. increases.

3) The so-called Borah Bloc of insurgent Republicans and sharpshooting Democrats, whose united front promised the Republican Senators a real battle on the Senate floor (TIME, July 1).

4) The strong though invisible influence of President Hoover himself, check-reining runaway tariff desires.

Senator Smoot was obviously upset at the abuse to which tariff revision had been subjected. To the complaint that Industry was benefiting over Husbandry, he retorted: "The House Ways & Means Committee and, so far, the Finance Committee, by gestures, have given farmers and producers by far the best of it. . . . The Democrats are so anxious to make political capital out of the situation that they are imagining all sorts of rates and unjust schedules."

Significant tariff developments last week:

Sugar. Senator Smoot accepted a sliding scale tariff for this most controversial item in the bill. Because his State, Utah, is a great producer of beet sugar; because the Mormon church, his church, is vitally interested in beet sugar, the sugar schedule was to have been Senator Smoot's well-protected pet. That he favored a sliding scale which he admitted would produce rates lower than those proposed in the House bill (3-c- per lb.), made even his Democratic opponents gasp in astonishment. They accepted his plan as another indication of the receding high-tariff tide. When pressed for details, Senator Smoot promised to give them out in a week. Crossly he added: "Then the papers can print as many lies about them as they want to."

The week prior, a subcommittee of the Finance Committee had held sugar hearings to which flocked white men and brown men, businessmen and lawyermen, bearing bulging brief cases and in anything but a sweet humor. William Marion Jardine, Coolidge Secretary of Agriculture, now a lobbyist for the U. S. Beet Sugar Association, opened the argument: "The trouble about Sugar is there is too damned much of it being produced. . . . Give us a duty that will bring six-cent sugar . . . and we'll show you how to produce more sugar in the U. S."

Rudolph Spreckels, head of Spreckels Sugar Corp., great refiners, had suggested the sliding scale sugar tariff and obtained for it the President's cautious approval. Complex in operation, its purpose would be to stabilize the retail price of sugar at 6-c- per lb. (present price: 5-c-). The tariff would run from 1-c- to 2.4-c- per lb. As the retail price of sugar went up, the tariff would go down and vice versa.

The U. S. housewife's prejudice against beet sugar, her belief that it is inferior to cane, was admitted by Senator Smoot. He narrated: "Once I took a sack of beet sugar to my wife who rejected it, saying she did not like to cook with beet sugar.

Later I took the sack off and gave her the same sugar. I said 'Mama, that's very much better sugar than I first sent, isn't it?' and she said 'Oh, yes.' "

Teased Mississippi's Democratic Senator Harrison: "I'm surprised that you should deceive your wife!"

Automobiles. A movement within the committee was started by Pennsylvania's Senator Reed to reduce or eliminate the 25% ad valorem tariff on motor cars. Theory: this U. S. industry, with its huge exports, no longer needs protection. Motormen Henry Ford, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., Alvan Macauley (Packard, National Automotive Chamber of Commerce) and Walter C. White, were among those invited to step forward and give their views on this change. When they failed to make prompt response, there was committee talk of subpoenaing them.

It is a social axiom, an economic platitude, that only the U. S. rich buy motors abroad. Last year's imports were 566 cars valued at $1,201,000. Senator Reed was apparently less interested in relieving the U. S. rich of a duty which they scarcely feel, than in neutralizing the public effect of duty increases on Pennsylvania-produced commodities. To cut the automobile duty would, psychologically if not economically, reduce Industry's protection, make Husbandry's protection seem larger. This Reed proposal seemed to illustrate what Senator Smoot had meant by Finance Committee gestures.

No inrush of foreign cars was anticipated by the U. S. motor industry in the wake of such a tariff change, which, many thought, would produce a favorable psychological effect abroad, might even relax tariff barriers now raised against U. S. motor exports. But what many an independent motorman feared was that big U. S. concerns--Ford and General Motors --already equipped with factories abroad, would produce cars by cheap labor for shipment back to the U. S. duty free to undersell the U. S. market. Henry Ford's fabrication of tractors in Ireland with the privilege of bringing them into the U. S. duty free as "agricultural implements" lent strength to this fear, foreshadowed dissension in the industry on a tariff cut.

Carillons. Great is the dispute between U. S. and foreign bell-makers as to their relative skill in casting carillons. The issue cropped up hotly before the Senate Committee last week in connection with the carillon purchased in England by John D. Rockefeller Jr. for Manhattan's Park Avenue Baptist Church. The present duty on carillons is 40%. The House bill cut this duty to 20%. William R. Conklin, Rockefeller counsel, urged the elimination of all duty, asserted that the U. S. has no good carillon makers. William R. Meneely of Troy, N. Y., whose ancestors made bells in Revolutionary times, retorted that his firm casts first-rate bells, that Mr. Rockefeller alone was agitating for a reduced tariff on carillons,* that Mr. Rockefeller was a bargain-hunter.

* Another agitator: Edward William Bok, Philadelphia publicist, whose son William Curtis testified last winter before the House tariff-makers. Last week the Curtis Institute of Music, pet project of Mrs. Bok, announced a course in campanology (carillon-playing) under Anton Brees, carillonneur of the Bok carillon at Mountain Lake, Fla.