THE PRESIDENCY: The Hoover Week: Sep. 22, 1930

President & Mrs. Hoover and Herbert Hoover Jr. weekended at the Rapidan camp, for the first time this year taking along no guests, no work. ¶ To reduce the influx of alien labor and thereby relieve U. S. unemployment, the President ordered the State Department to tighten up its enforcement of the “public charge” provision of the Immigration Law.Under this provision U. S. consuls will be instructed to exercise their discretionary power to refuse passport visas to all non-preference quota immigration applicants unless each can convincinglyrefute the presumption that upon arrival in the U. S. he will join the jobless and become dependent upon charity. (If the applicant says he has a job promised him, he is automatically barred by the law’s “contract labor” restriction.) Application of the “public charge” clause to Mexican immigration has already reduced alien labor entries from that country from an annual average of 56,747 to 6,280. The same method has been used to cut less drastically Canadian labor immigration. ¶ To a $3,000,000 hurricane relief loan sought by Santo Domingo in the U. S. President Hoover had no objection.

¶ The new Tariff Commission which President Hoover expects to tell him how to flex out scientifically the injustices and inequalities of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act stood complete last week. The President revealed the names of only his first three selections: Henry P. Fletcher (chairman), Republican, of Pennsylvania, onetime U. S. Ambassador to Italy; Thomas Walker Page, Democrat, of Virginia, chairman of Wilson’s Tariff Commission; John Lee Coulter, Republican, of North Carolina, chief economist and chairman of the Advisory Board of the present Commission, onetime president of North Dakota Agricultural & Mechanical College, able rural economist. Meanwhile Citizen Calvin Coolidge took his first public dig at a Hoover policy. In his daily syndicate article, Citizen Coolidge wrote: “The report that the Tariff Commission is about to start investigations of a wide variety of commodities will not give much encouragement to business. … A very bad tariff would be better than constant agitation, uncertainty, foreign animosity and change. . . . Hope for a purely scientific tariff will prove a delusion. Any prolonged investigations, covering many schedules for the purpose of rewriting the law, will do more harm than good. Many will be injured while none will be satisfied. And the country will not be benefited.”