Comments on: Smoot

By: David Y.

David Y. — Fri, 25 May 2012 04:47:57 +0000

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:25:15 +0000

Ah, that last line. No, I don’t suppose that the fourth word has a typo–the Senate has had many drunkards and I’m not so sure that it hasn’t been a better place because of them. But no, the writer must be referring to a German Baptist sect noted for their baptisms which involved multiple immersions (once for the Father, once for the Son and once for the Holy Spirit).

They were at various times and places called Dunkards or Dunkers and there have been a large handful of other sects that have split from them.

Their most famous appearance is probably on the battlefield at Antietam. They were pacifists and didn’t fight. But a little white clapboard Dunker Church stood on the northwest edge of the battlefield, and overlooked some of the bloodiest fighting of that terrible day, as Union troops attacked from the north through a wheat field and towards the Confederates’ position in a sunken lane that, as so many others in the Civil War, became known by the adjective “bloody.” [Lest our British readers wonder, that was a fully American "bloody" and referred to the terrible carnage that took place there.]

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:11:52 +0000

It’s just too bad that nobody named an office building after him, since it could then be called “the Smoot Office Building,” and, for short, “the SOB.”

By: Amy T

Amy T — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:14:02 +0000

That’s the problem with a politician having a name like Smoot. It’s so good for doggerel verse. Thinking of Ogden Nash and his poem about the newspaper headline “Smoot smites smut.”

By: kevinf

kevinf — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:54:33 +0000

Interesting little poem. Smoot served for a long time in the Senate, and became somewhat of a tariff guru. My recollection is that some of his bills that passed had the effect of raising prices on much needed foreign imports during the height of the depression, and may have contributed, along with other folks, to lengthening and deepening the great depression.

If that sounds snarky, I did not mean it to be. He stands as an important figure in establishing that no religious test could be applied to federal offices, but it came too late for BH Roberts, who was denied his seat in the House of Representatives a few years earlier.