By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

As I was teaching my international political economy class Tuesday, 3/4/25, we covered tariffs and trade wars. Such events played out in real time during the course, as March 4, 2025 was a day for the U.S. to launch taxes on trade for other countries, with retaliation followed. The resulting stock market selloff conjured up memories of another historical trade war and stock market collapse in 1929. Could history be repeating itself.

Most of us were introduced to the “Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act” of 1929-1930 in the classic 1980s film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” where comedian Ben Stein humorously presents this economic case as a high school teacher. Does anyone remember that? Anyone? Anyone? I later went to graduate school with a descendant of the Hawley family, so my interest in this case was piqued.

The 1928 Election was a big romp for Republicans, as Herbert Hoover easily prevailed over New York Governor Al Smith, a Democrat. The GOP had majorities in the House and Senate. They could pass whatever they want. And the economy was humming along, or at least it appeared to be. We wouldn’t learn about the disastrous economic and political policies of Calvin Coolidge’s policies until later. But you can read more about them here, in another Cobb County Courier article of mine about the preceding administration.

One group wasn’t doing well: farmers. They struggled throughout the 1920s for a myriad of reason. I got that from stories about our family farm in Southeastern Wisconsin. So the GOP majority went to work on a tariff bill to tax imports and protect American agriculture.

The problem was that the architects of the bill, Utah Senator Reed Smoot, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Oregon Congressman Willis Hawley, Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, kept adding stuff to the bill, as did their supporters in Congress. What was supposed to be a narrowly targeted bit of protectionism morphed into a massive tariff bill.

It was eventually signed by President Hoover in June of 1930. Defenders of Hoover and those protectionists claimed that the Great Depression began in the Fall of 1929 with the stock market meltdown later in the year. But that excuse doesn’t work. Here’s why.

The House of Representatives passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in May of 1929. Knowing the GOP easily had the votes to get it through the Senate and had an ally in the White House, other countries didn’t wait for the bad bill to be signed. They started retaliating right away. U.S. exports to other countries plunged as those nations imposed their own protectionist measures. The seeds for the destruction of the Stock Market, already planted earlier in the decade, fully bloomed with anticipation of this trade-killing bill. And even most of those who don’t blame the Smoot-Hawley bill for starting the Great Depression acknowledge that the bill made the economic downturn even worse.

A huge number of economists and even business leaders like Henry Ford and the leader of J.P. Morgan came to the White House, pleading with the President not to sign it, after the Senate passed the bill in the Spring of 1930. But he ignored their concerns. Then unemployment rocketed up from 8% to more than 25 percent in just a year or two. FDR campaigned against the Smoot-Hawley bill. Both Smoot and Hawley, and Hoover, were voted out of office in 1932. But the damage was done. And it got worse, as the free world had already engaged in tit-for-tat tariffs, undermining any sort of cooperation that could have stood up to the Axis Powers, until it was almost too late.

Hopefully cooler heads, business leaders, economists, and now historians can show this administration how such policies could produce far reaching damage not only to our stock market and economy, but any sort of international cooperation needed to stop Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.