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Democratic opposition to a G. O. P. tariff was still fluid. Alfred Emanuel Smith, in the campaign, had declared for a "compensatory tariff," to which many a Democratic Congressman heedlessly pledged himself. Tennessee's Democratic Cordell Hull of the Ways & Means Committee alone had raised a John-The-Baptist cry against Republican tariff plans. Hardly a Democratic Congressman but had some pampered local industry he would like to see "protected," ranging from women's shoes in Brooklyn to cane sugar in Louisiana.
But for all its diligence, a certain futility marked the tariff labors of the House Ways & Means Committee. A quarter of a mile across the Capitol grounds waited the man who in the end would leave the largest impress of authority upon this legislation —Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance.*The House writes tariff bills; the Senate Finance Committee chairman rewrites them.
Abraham Owen Smoot crossed the plains in 1846 with Brigham Young, was mayor of Salt Lake City when the U. S. Army descended upon that "nest of polygamous iniquity." To him by his wife Anne in 1862 was born a third child, a son named Reed. Ten years later Abe Smoot moved his Mormon household to Prove, 50 miles south of the Utah capital, there to start a woolen mill, to import the first beet sugar mill west of the Mississippi.
Under the shadows of the Wasatch Range, Reed Smoot attended the Brigham Young Academy, clerked in his father's store, worked in his father's woolen mill. A good Mormon, he believed that the sober labors of this life prepared for the life to come. Soberly, he subscribed to two New York newspapers of different faiths, read them comparatively for a year, solemnly concluded that only as a Republican could his business soul be saved. From that decision Reed Smoot has never since flinched.
Meanwhile his strength as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints waxed great. In 1900 he was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles which made him a sort of Mormon cardinal. Today by the rule of seniority only two men stand between him and the Presidency of the Mormon Church— President Heber J. Grant and Chief Apostle Rudger Clawson. Someday Apostle Smoot may head his church and converse privately with God.
The Mormon Church is a business as well as a religion. Reed Smoot busied himself with its finances, pulled them out of a rut, made its beet sugar and woolen enterprises return good profits. His industry, in 1903, was rewarded with an election to the U. S. Senate.