Death of a Woodcutter

One of the most enormous acts of isolationism in U.S. history was committed in June 1930: passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Its purpose was to give U.S. producers a noncompetitive monopoly of the U.S. market, regardless of the consequences abroad. It was the brain-child of Utah's Senator Reed Smoot, a Mormon Apostle, and of Oregon's Willis Chatman Hawley, a slow-witted, powerful man, once a champion woodcutter in Oregon, who had risen from the post of principal of Umpqua Academy at Wilbur, Ore. to the chairmanship of the House Ways & Means Committee.

The bill was 14 months in preparation. The Tariff Commission submitted 2,750 pages of data; 11,000 pages of tables and data filled the printed hearings, in which Hawley listened to 1,131 witnesses, Smoot, to 1,232; 2,800 pages of the Congressional Record recorded the debate. The bill raised tariff rates on more than 650 articles, some of them to the highest level in U.S. history. As the bill passed, a Tennessee Congressman named Cordell Hull, famed for his persistent 23-year-long losing fight for freedom of trade, wept.

Thirty-three countries protested, then took revenge by erecting their own trade barriers. Austria's Credit-Anstalt failed. Foreign credits began to be called. U.S. gold imports increased. The Republicans lost their House majority for the first time in 14 years. The Young Plan fell apart. England abandoned its historic free-trade policy. European nations set up quotas, licenses, exchange controls, other trade barriers. The depression was immeasurably deepened.

In 1931, 19 nations went off the gold

standard, 34 by 1933. "Buy British" became the Empire slogan. The New York Stock Exchange's new long-term foreign issues shrank from 1928's billion dollars to 1932,s nothing. England went off gold. In the U.S. men sold apples on street corners; the Bonus Army marched on Washington. Into power in Germany came a nervous, harsh-voiced, twisted genius named Adolf Hitler. Economic nationalism, forced into full flower by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, became the physical basis for the ideology of Fascism. The lines were written, the stage was set for World War II.

Last February, in St. Petersburg, Fla., died Apostle Reed Smoot, still isolationist, still bitter at Cordell Hull's reciprocal trade agreements, which partially nullified the still-existing Smoot-Hawley Act. And last week, in Salem, Ore., death came to Willis Hawley, 77, the Oregon axman who had helped chop down the economic foundations of the world.

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