How to Lose Friends

To supply U.S. housewives on washday, six U.S. companies and nine competing foreign nations manufacture spring-operated clothespins at the rate of 791 million a year. Last week, to please the six U.S. companies--and protect a market worth less than $4,000,000--at the risk of offending Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Yugoslavia and five others, President Eisenhower doubled the tariff on imports of spring clothespins to the U.S. Concurring in a Tariff Commission finding that domestic industry was "injured" by rising imports, he raised the tariff from 10-c- per gross to 20-c- per gross, to give "appropriate relief," but rejected a recommendation for cutting imports by 50%.

What is likely to anger foreign natipns --and raise cries that the U.S. preaches but does not practice free trade--is the fact that domestic sales, as the President himself noted, "have increased in recent years, reaching an alltime high last year." But despite this, domestic producers have campaigned for strict import curbs ever since 1949, complaining of low wages abroad and their own high costs. However, imports' total share of the market in 1956 was only 29%, and the "serious injury" the U.S. companies complained about amounted to barely an 8% increase in five years.

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