Cubans & Housewives Glad

With great grumpings and whirrings, 156 sugar mills in Cuba last week commenced to grind the 1930 cane crop. Set in motion by a presidential decree, they will work night and day for four months manufacturing some 4,500,000 tons of raw sugar. About the centrals was a new and unexpected enthusiasm. Officers and workers smiled and laughed for they had something to make them happy: the Senate of the U. S. had refused to increase the U. S. customs duty on raw sugar.

In the Battle of Schedule Five of the Senate's tariff war, Old Guardsmen, led by Generalissimo Reed Smoot, chairman of the Finance Committee, had stormed the redoubt of the Democratic-Progressive Republican coalition with a demand for a higher sugar rate. The fighting was fierce and confused, with troopers switching from side to side like the tail of a fly-bitten horse. When the lines were reformed and counted, it was found that the Old Guard had been repulsed.

Rates. What happened, legislatively speaking, was fairly simple: The present world sugar tariff rate into the U. S. is 2.20-c- per lb. Cuba, enjoying a 20% differential below the world rate, pays 1.76-c- per lb. At the demand of cane growers in Louisiana, beet growers in Colorado, Michigan and Utah, the House voted a 3-c- sugar rate (Cuban: 2.40-c-). To stifle public outcry against this increase, yet give domestic sugar producers more "protection," Senator Smoot's Finance Committee proposed a world sugar rate of 2.75-c- (Cuban: 2.20-c-). Senator Harrison of Mississippi, in the name of U. S. sugar consumers (housewives) who would pay an additional $54,000,000 per year under the proposed Finance Committee plan, moved that the existing rates be retained.

48-to-38. In the vote, the Harrison motion to retain the present sugar rates was, to the surprise of many, adopted 48-to-38, rejecting the Finance Committee's proposed increase. Nine Old Guardsmen, with only sugar consumers in their States and up for re-election this year, went over to the Coalition. Three Progressive Republicans from beet-sugar-growing States (Howell of Nebraska, Nye and Frazier of North Dakota) supported a higher rate. Four Democrats (King of Utah, Kendrick of Wyoming, Ransdell and Broussard of Louisiana) joined the protectionist Old Guard.

Next day the Senate defeated (54-to-22) a proposal by Senator Howell to pay domestic sugar producers a bounty of .44-c- per lb. at a cost of ten million dollars per year to the U. S. Treasury.

"Simple Graft." The Senate's sugar vote was the culmination of a year's efforts by high and low sugar lobbies. Last week Chairman Caraway of the Senate Lobby Committee reported on their activities. They had, he said, spent jointly some $400,000 to influence tariff legislation. Declared he: "The whole scheme is nothing but simple graft. . . . People might just as well go to a palm reader or a crystal gazer as to give their money to lobbyists."

The committee found "no impropriety nor anything open to censure or criticism" in President Hoover's behavior when the law-duty sugar lobby attempted to capitalize his name and his interest through personal connections. But it did consider "particularly reprehensible" the low-duty lobby's effort to stir up hostility to the U. S. in Latin-America.

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