THE TARIFF: Popularizer; Protector

To make Europe like the high rates of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act became last week the special duty of John F. Bethune, selected by Chairman Henry Prather Fletcher and his five Tariff Commissioners as their No. 1 representative abroad. For this important foreign post Mr. Bethune has had eleven years’ training as secretary to the old Commission in the stuffy, antiquated rooms of Washington’s Oil Land Office Building.

Mr. Bethune’s job is: 1) to convince manufacturers that the U. S. tariff wall is not so high an obstacle to their exports as they think; 2) somehow to secure from them private information on their production costs which the Tariff Commission may use to make the wall lower or higher.

¶ Also appointed last week was Sidney Morgan, investigator for the U. S. Bureau of Efficiency, to be the Tariff Commission’s new secretary.

¶Clinton Wallace Gilbert, correspondent for the New York Evening Post, last week dug up and reported the following story: When Mr. Fletcher was appointed chair man, his great & good friend Charles Ed win Mitchell, board chairman of New York’s National City Bank, wrote him: “Dear Henry — I hear you have a new job.

In your former jobs you always had a title and a diplomatic uniform of sorts, I cannot give you a title but I am sending you a uniform by express.” Two days later Chairman Fletcher received a large box from A. G. Spalding & Bros, from which he extracted a football headguard, a catcher’s mask, a chest protector, shin guards, a metal athletic supporter.

What Correspondent Gilbert did not report was Chairman Fletcher’s reply to Mr. Mitchell: “Thanks a lot. But what I’ll probably need most is a protector in the rear.”