ABSTRACT
The new chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means was Jere Cooper an old-school Southerner, traditionally and personally committed to lower tariffs. The trade association leaders and others whose devotion are to the industry rather than to a firm admit that they regard the tariff issue as a godsend because it is one of the few issues which comes near uniting the industry. Tactically, the textile industry in 1955 seems to have borrowed its procedures from those successfully followed by Pittsburgh Plate Glass and to a lesser degree by Westinghouse Electric in 1954 in their campaigns against reciprocal trade. The protectionists simply did not have the substantial margin needed to deny the leadership its way, but they had enough to impose a real check on the liberal traders. The Reciprocal Trade Act had explicitly prohibited the transfer of items to the free list.
