Consequences: We Tried High Tariffs in the 1930s and the Result was Calamitous
Ninety-five years ago, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which imposed the highest taxes on imports in 100 years. Economists petitioned President Herbert Hoover to please, please veto it. Business journalists said the same.
Merryle Rukeyser (father of the late Louis Rukeyser of PBS’s “Wall Street Week”) wrote that Hoover “ought to think twice” before signing it. B.C. Forbes, founder of the eponymous magazine, wrote in his column for the Hearst newspapers, “The day will come when men will look back upon tariff walls as spite fences.”
The critics were right. But Hoover signed it — and the stock market, already weakened, immediately went into a swoon.
America had high tariffs for more than a century. When 1930 began, the average tax on dutiable non-farm imports was 40 percent. Smoot-Hawley Tariff boosted it to 59 percent. America was slipping into the Great Depression, and nosebleed taxes on foreign products were supposed to save American jobs. Mostly they didn’t.
https://www.postalley.org/2025/02/17/consequences-we-tried-high-tariffs-in-the-1930s-and-the-result-was-calamitous/
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