Chinese Textile Tariffs - 21 November 2003

The scene, as they say in theatre programmes, is a small newspaperman's office in the National Press building in Washington DC.

The time is a bright, hot morning in the spring of 1940.

This small room has one well-worn easy chair, a small desk bearing a towering old manual typewriter of the earliest model.

There's a small bookshelf with a dozen or less reference books slumping against each other.

The door of the office is half open and once you enter through it you're aghast at the most characteristic feature of the office and its tenant.

There's a mountain of unread newspapers wobbling on a slapping tide of unanswered, indeed unopened cables from London.

All of them are from the foreign editor of the London paper of which we're poking into the Washington office: the Washington headquarters of The Times, irreverently called by Americans "The London Times".

At the time I was the second string to both the Washington and the New York correspondents, living in New York and doing odd pieces for the New York man but on call when need be by the chief, the great man of British journalism in America then, Sir Wilmot Harsent Lewis - known to everybody in the press building as Old Bill Lewis until he'd been knighted.

On that spring morning in 1940 Sir Wilmot had summoned me to Washington.

"I have," he said over the telephone in his rolling baritone, "something for you."

So now we enter that tiny office and face its giant inhabitant - giant by comparison with his surroundings.

He was well over six feet, he stood as straight as a grenadier normally and spoke like an archbishop, at least as archbishops used to speak, in a form of magisterial southern educated English with the articulation of a classical Shakespearean actor. Back in those days John Gielgud would have made a very good archbishop.

When I arrived he was sitting tapping away at this monstrous typewriter. Like all the best reporters of those days he used four fingers, at most, to type with.

At that moment he turned stiffly round - apparently he had a bad back. With one hand he waved me to the easy chair, his right hand picking up his smouldering cigarette.

He said in his most Episcopal manner: "What do you hear from the mob?"

In a moment, a sentence you see, he was able to puncture his austere façade.

He was in fact the most relaxed, informal, wittiest cynic I ever knew. He turned towards me his craggy, long face with small, hooked nose, the high forehead, the neat parted hair, but it was his eyes - gooseberry green, mischievous, with a hint of malice - that told you volumes about his past, present, disposition, most of all his built-in resistance to any form of pressure or persuasion from what he called "official sources".

In those far off days the two or three top British correspondents had easy access to senators, congressmen, governors. They all loved to have a mention, a good press, in England.

I should remind any puzzled younger listeners that at the time London was the capital of the British Empire and the British Empire owned between a third and a quarter of the globe.

Because of his position as The Times reporter, because of his formidable bearing but most of all because of the quality of his dispatches and the potential effect they could and often did have on British policy towards the United States, Wilmot Lewis had confidential access to the president himself.

And one or two presidents were not beyond suggesting the correct interpretation of some bill or policy they were pushing hard.

Now, 10 years before that spring morning, in June 1930, the Senate had passed a bill which Wilmot Lewis privately thought was the worst thing that had happened to America in his time.

It was a tariff bill, composed by two senators whose ill fame still resounds through Washington - Senator Smoot and Senator Hawley.

It was known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. And in spite of public protest and a petition to President Hoover of over a thousand American economists, it raised tariffs to the highest level in history.

The bill had been written on the inspiration of an encouraging rally in stock prices, which regained between a third and a half of the dreadful low to which they'd fallen the previous October 1929 - the month of the terrible Wall Street crash.

Senators Smoot and Hawley persuaded the Senate and President Hoover that a stiff, high tariff barrier for all but a favoured country or two would halt the Depression and fortify the economy against another slump.

Wilmot Lewis's despatch to The Times was an objective report but he included in it the fears of some senators and that army of economists that the bill would produce a wave of retaliatory tariffs.

At a White House party one evening President Hoover moved up close to Lewis and questioned his interpretation.

"Why, Bill," he wondered, "couldn't you have seen it more from the White House's view? What have you got to lose?"

Green eyes gleaming: "My virginity, Mr President," he said.

It could have been the curtain line to a fine old melodrama and I'd not be surprised if he hadn't waited for an occasion to use it.

Wilmot Lewis was a Welshman born, who in his youth found himself, as he put it, in the Far East where he did a variety of jobs including newspaper work and some unspecified financial advising to some unspecified oriental tycoon or provincial ruler.

And at one time he admitted he'd been a roving, not very affluent, actor. From two of these occupations you could infer two of his characteristics - his steady scepticism about Wall Street expertise and his love of what you might call theatrical pronouncements.

His polite refusal to take the administration line on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill was, as it turned out, judicially taken.

The bill had hoped to boost the stock market, the spring rally, and help write the obituary of the winter Depression. It had the exactly opposite effect.

The rally proved to be not a rally but what Wall Street calls "a dead cat bounce".

Britain responded with a policy of what was called Empire free trade, excluding the dominions from new tariffs imposed against other countries.

Throughout the summer of 1930 many countries followed suit. The stock market went into an uninterrupted decline.

World trade kept in falling step with the market. Production dropped everywhere.

In the United States alone 1300 banks closed their doors. The country's unemployment rose to an unprecedented four and a half million.

By the winter of 1930-31 even the perpetual optimists admitted that a general worldwide economic depression had set in.

President Hoover's two-year-old boast that America had reached a plateau of permanent prosperity became a bitter mockery.

This memory of Wilmot Lewis and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was inevitably called to mind when President Bush announced this week that he would follow up his long-lamented tariff on steel by limiting the huge amount of imports of Chinese clothing fabrics - shirts, blouses, dressing gowns, bras and those many exquisite little shoes and slippers that cost so little in this country.

Mr Bush yielded months ago to the pleas of unemployed American steel workers with that whopping 30% tariff and now of course he's protecting the work - and the votes next November - of the struggling American textile workers.

There's another presidential candidate who is eager to secure and likely to get the Democrats' presidential nomination.

He's a former governor of Vermont, a professed liberal. He nevertheless has swung into line with the new liberal line which is protection. Protection had always been a Republican monopoly.

He received this week with much joy the endorsement of the largest industrial union in the country.

So what has all this to do with Wilmot Lewis and my summons to Washington?

Flashback to that spring morning in 1940.

After we shared a Washington pleasantry or two, Sir Wilmot put his hand into an inside pocket and produced what might have been a small deck of cards.

He dealt them to me one at a time like a careful poker player.

They were all his correspondent's passes - to the Senate, to the House, to the White House and - glory be - his two press credentials to the coming Republican and Democrat presidential conventions.

I felt like a young baseball fanatic who has been given a privileged seat at the World Series.

"This is wonderful," I said, "but - but, Bill, why?"

He heaved a sigh.

"Because, dear boy," he said, "I have decided that what happened today happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow."

For too long since the Boer War he'd watched the cycles of war and peace, war and peace, boom and bust.

From now on he would do the big authoritative pieces, no more daily grind. He lifted himself stiffly from his chair:

"Now for the treatment," he said.

He tottered to the door, chuckled at the litter of unopened cables and stood in the door like Henry V and said:

"Not Caligula nor the courts of Genghis Khan ever devised a torture so exquisite as the bi-monthly massaging of the prostate gland. Goodbye, my boy."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.