"Not Many"

Sorely tried last week was many a Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee now secretly drafting the Tariff Bill. Each had been placed under strictest party orders to keep his mouth shut, to babble none of the Committee's confidential doings to newsmen clustered inquisitively at the closed door. Silence was such an ordeal that some Senators ducked and dodged away by back passages, while others took the press blockade on the run.

Thus racing away, his lips uncomfortably sealed, Senator James Eli Watson, Republican Leader, was overtaken in the corridor by a newsgatherer who panted his question: "Say. Senator--is everything-- in the bill--going up?" Leader Watson, unable to resist temptation longer, shot back as he hurried on: "No, not everything. Some things are coming down-- but not many."

While only unauthenticated guesses covered the committee's activities as it raced against time to have a bill ready for the Senate to gnaw on by Aug. 19, outside-tariff developments were:

1) Smarting under the lambasting given his pet legislation. Chairman Reed Smoot came to the Tariff Bill's defense: "I want to put the American people on guard against a deliberate campaign of misrepresentation. . . . Criticism is inspired by propagandists of selfish groups. . . . We are joined in the intention to write the best tariff bill ever enacted. . . ."

2) So fractious a subject was sugar that the Committee agreed to give additional public hearings on the Smoot plan for a sliding tariff scale on this commodity (TIME, July 15). Said the Senator: "What the American sugar producers want is the House rate [3-c- per lb.] but I am putting forward the sliding scale so that if there should be a runaway in the sugar market, it cannot be laid to the tariff." Farm Lobbyist Chester H. Gray called the Smoot plan a "risky experiment," protested its use on agricultural products, advised it be first "tried out on some profitable industrial commodity.''

3) That Republican Senator William Edgar Borah of Idaho should oppose the flexible provisions of the proposed Tariff Bill occasioned no great surprise in Washington. That he should express his opposition by a formal statement from Democratic National Committee headquarters, as he did last week, was surprising indeed. With a gleeful rattle a Democratic mimeograph ground out this Borah opinion: "There is no better illustration of the growth of bureaucracy than the story of the flexible tariff. . . . We are now delegating the full taxing power to the Executive."