To Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practices Known as Compulsory Block-Booking and Blind Selling of Motion-Picture Films in Interstate and Foreign ... Day, June 5), 1939 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from To Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practic...)
Excerpt from To Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practices Known as Compulsory Block-Booking and Blind Selling of Motion-Picture Films in Interstate and Foreign Commerce: June 7 (Legislative Day, June 5), 1939
The sponsors of the bill assume that each of the eight major (lead ing) producer-distributors leases to the exhibitors during each recurrent selling season its production of pictures for -the ensuing year in large blocks - often the entire output, thus affording the exhibitors no choice but to take all of the pictures offered, or none.
What are the facts in connection with this charge that exhibitors must take all or none of the motion pictures produced and distributed by each of the leading companies? Several of the leading distributing companies compiled and put in the record of the hearings before the subcommittee (see pp. 268 to 271 and 303 to 305, inclusive), c'o'mp lete tabulations of the number of accounts or theaters that licensedp and exhibited each of the feature pictures released by the company during the most recent 12 months playing season for which the figures are complete. The facts flatly refute this assumption of the sponsors cf the bill and are not contradicted.
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Ellison DuRant Smith was American Senator from South Carolina, known as "Cotton Ed" Smith.
Background
He was born on August 1, 1864 at Tanglewood, the 2, 000-acre plantation near Lynchburg, South Carolina, United States, which had been in family hands since his English forebears settled there in 1747. He was one of five children and the youngest of the three sons of William Hawkins Smith, a Methodist minister, and Mary Isabella (McLeod) Smith; his brother Alexander Coke Smith became a prominent Methodist bishop. His mother was a native of the Scottish Isle of Skye.
Education
He received his early education at schools in Lynchburg and Charleston, South Carolina. He entered South Carolina College in 1885, but the following year transferred to Wofford College, where he was graduated in 1889.
Career
Smith first entered politics in 1890, the year in which Benjamin R. Tillman led the agrarian masses in a political revolt against Wade Hampton and the aristocrats. When, that October, a convention of die-hard conservatives met and nominated Alexander C. Haskell as an independent candidate against Tillman, Smith was listed as a delegate, although he later denied being present.
He represented Sumter County in the state legislature from 1897 to 1900 and made an unsuccessful bid for election to Congress in 1901. Himself a cotton farmer at Lynchburg, Smith became active during the next few years in a movement to organize Southern cotton growers. He attended growers' conventions in Louisiana in 1904 and 1905, where his forensic efforts attracted wide attention and earned him the nickname "Cotton Ed, " which he thereafter cherished.
In 1905 he became a field agent for the Southern Cotton Association, which sought to raise cotton prices; the statewide contacts he established strengthened his political base. As a candidate for the United States Senate in 1908, "Cotton Ed" unveiled the pageantry that was to become his trademark. Perched on two cotton bales in a wagon drawn by lint-plastered mules, with a cotton boll in his lapel, he stumped the state proclaiming his devotion to "my sweetheart, Miss Cotton. " Smith won the election over several formidable opponents, the beginning of a long Senate career.
In Washington he joined the Democratic and Progressive onslaught upon the Taft Republicans, and with the Democratic triumph in 1912 he became an adherent of Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom. Like other Southern agrarians, Smith lent enthusiastic support to Wilson's farm program, the Federal Reserve Act, the Underwood Tariff, and the Federal Highways Act. He voted with less enthusiasm for the Clayton Act, the Adamson Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act.
After the Harding landslide of 1920, he reverted to his earlier role as Senatorial critic of the Republican administration, opposing the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, the fiscal policies of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but voting for restrictive immigration laws and the soldiers' bonus. Smith helped form the Senate's farm bloc in 1921. He opposed the McNary-Haugen bills in 1924 and 1926, but did support later versions of the McNary-Haugen plan. He also supported the World Court, a stand that, together with the opposition of Coleman L. Blease and the Ku Klux Klan, almost cost him the election of 1926, when his opponent (Edgar A. Brown) claimed that the Court had three Negro judges.
In the 1932 election, however, Smith had little difficulty in defeating Blease himself, as he had previously in 1914. An early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Smith had looked forward to a position in the new administration. Although he became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Smith had little influence in shaping the New Deal farm program.
Roosevelt attempted to "purge" Smith in the 1938 elections, but the strategy backfired and the Senator went on to win the greatest political triumph of his career. The mainstay of his campaign was the "Philadelphia Story, " a masterpiece of Southern political demagoguery in which he regaled his audiences with an account of his well-publicized walkout from that year's Democratic National Convention following an invocation by a Negro minister. Smith's last term was an anticlimax.
"Cotton Ed" died at Tanglewood of a coronary thrombosis just a few weeks before his term expired.
(Excerpt from To Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practic...)
Politics
Despite his early Bourbon affiliations, Smith was deeply affected by the ideology of the agrarian protest, and in his subsequent political career he waged a continuous battle against such old Populist enemies as the tariff, Wall Street, hard money, and big business.
He was a reliable Wilson supporter during and after World War I.
After 1935 Smith became more openly hostile to the administration. He also became more demagogic. Smith now unleashed a barrage of vitriolic tirades in the Senate against Negroes and against the proposed antilynching law. He vigorously opposed the regulation of wages and hours and, with appeals to the sanctity of states' rights, fought against the judiciary and executive reorganization bills of 1937.
Connections
On May 26, 1892, he married Martha Cornelia Moorer of St. George, South Carolina, who died the following year; their only child, Martius Ellison, was killed in 1912 in a hunting accident.
On October 31, 1906, Smith married Annie Brunson Farley of Spartanburg, South Carolina, by whom he had four children: Anna Brunson, Isobel McLeod, Ellison DuRant, and Charles Saxon Farley.