THE CABINET: Lodge v. Lowman

Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Seymour Lowman, whose arm, so he said last month, (TIME, Sept. 19), “grows tired” some days signing dismissals from the Prohibition forces, took pen in hand one day last week and signed an order addressed to U. S. customs officials. The order instructed the customs men to make a stiff increase in the duty on automobile and bicycle parts, and certain other hardware including cement and vulcanized fibres, imported from France.

It was in the nature of a routine order. France having lately an-nounced large tariff raises on similar U. S. products, it was mandatory for the U. S. Department of the Treasury—unless otherwise advised by the U. S. Department of State—to reply in kind, under a “countervailing” clause of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922. But in light of the current tariff imbroglio of France and the U. S. (see p. 18), during which the U. S. Department of State had been at pains to explain that the U. S. tariff policy is not discriminatory, newsgatherers naturally went scurrying to the Department of the Treasury to see whether Assistant Secretary Lowman would accompany his order with a press statement.

The affair might have passed off quietly had not the New York Herald Tribune quoted Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Lowman as follows: “The American (tariff) policy is one of reciprocity. That’s our policy: they go up, we go up. They go down, we go down.”

The Herald Tribune correspondent who reported this statement has a mind that rises above routine. He is, as it happens, the pink-cheeked, Harvard-educated, quick-thinking grandson and namesake of the late Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Besides being a shrewd reporter, long-legged Grandson Lodge is internationally-minded beyond his years (26) and is in training for a political career of his own. Personal interest was doubtless mixed with professional curiosity when Grandson Lodge pressed his inquiry and found 1) that the Department of State had not been consulted prior to the issuance of Assistant Secretary Lowman’s order, 2) that Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon had not reviewed the order, as perfunctorily stated in it, and 3) that Department of State officials were “surprised” by Mr. Lowman’s order and “astounded” by his alleged “reciprocity” statement.

Next day brought suppressed fireworks. Secretary Mellon, of course, endorsed his subordinate’s order and firmly pronounced it a matter in which the Department of the Treasury had no discretionary power. But this endorsement did not come until after Mr. Mellon had summoned Mr. Lowman to his office first thing in the morning and asked him about the “reciprocity” statement. Mr. Lowman announced that he had never made so stupid a mistake and said he would never presume to enunciate a Government policy. So, while the Department of State fumed with embarrassment and Frenchmen scowled in perplexity, the matter was officially dropped.

But Grandson Lodge did not drop it. “Seymour Lowman . . . was in the bad graces of the Government today,” he reported. “Secretary Mellon and . . . Secretary of State Kellogg both in private attacked Mr. Lowman’s alleged tactlessness. ‘He has been a bull in the china shop ever since he came down here from New York,’ one Senator remarked.”

Grandson Lodge reported Mr. Lowman’s denial of the “reciprocity” and then, in flat contradiction, wrote: “Mr. Lowman, however, did say that ‘the American policy is one of reciprocity’ to the Herald Tribune correspondent, who had not asked him for an explanation of the ruling.”

Grandson Lodge also wrote: has led some observers to believe that Mr. Lowman’s days in his present office may be numbered.” And Mr. Lowman, if his days were numbered, may well have believed that the man who numbered them was Grandson Lodge.