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There his reception was historic but not cordial. Upon his tall soberly garbed figure descended all the old righteous rage of the East against the Latter-day Saints. Christian pastors bellowed for his expulsion from the Senate. The ancient horrors of polygamy were dragged out and paraded before the world—despite the fact that polygamy had long since ceased to be a tenet of Mormonism. Humble and meek to a fault, Senator Smoot hung on against this two-year gale of religious disapproval, worked, waited, prayed. At the feet of Aldrich and Penrose and Lodge he became an apt pupil. His ascent to power in the Senate was steady and unspectacular. When North Dakota in 1922 retired Porter James McCumber from the Senate, Senator Smoot slipped his awkward frame into the chairman's seat of the potent Finance Committee—a legislative eminence comparable to the religious height of Mormon Apostle. Ever since he has dictated and executed the tax and tariff policies in Congress of the Republican administration.
In the Senate he has become "a lion for efficiency, a tiger for economy, a wolf for detail." No branch of the Government was too obscure for him to explore. The U. S. Bureau of Efficiency is his legislative child. But in the confusion of Senate debate, Senator Smoot gives no hint of his great influence. His voice is thin and quarrelsome. Senatorial badgers easily fluster him. He tries to smother them under a blanket of indisputable statistics, only to scold them for their mockery of his "facts."*
Now at 67 he is still tall and lean and lank, but dried and greyed by the years. A widower with six children, he resides in a magnificent marble house just north of the Connecticut Ave. bridge. The family home in Provo has long since stood shuttered and vacant, grass tall in its yard— supposedly a symbol of the Senator's personal sacrifice in public service. His high poke collar with its white linen tie has given way to a lower softer neckdress, but there has been no relaxation in the grim stiff Smoot personality. From his indefatigability has sprung the verb to smoot.
Only three things break into the Senator's smooting: 1) vaudeville; 2) golf; 3) the Washington Zoo. For diversion this stern man went every Friday night to Keith's Theatre to sit in the second row just behind the orchestra leader and gaze over the footlights in unsmiling delight. Great was his sorrow when the theatre closed. His golf came at the age of 63. Now from 6 to 7 a. m. he plays a round on the capital's public links, shooting 110 in straight cautious jabs. At the Washington Zoo Senator Smoot liked to poke around among the birds and animals until Helen, a parrot, told him to "go to hell."
The Smoot feet, large and heavy, once almost created a diplomatic Incident when the French Debt Funding Commission returned to Paris to complain that Senator Smoot, a U. S. Commissioner, had comfortably rested his well-filled shoes upon their conference table. The catch word of that conference was France's "capacity to pay." At its conclusion a French Commissioner called upon Senator Smoot to bid him farewell, to ask if it were really true that Mormons practiced polygamy and if so, how they did it. The Senator replied: "That all depends upon—'the capacity to pay.' "