These data points are inconsistent with blaming the Smoot-Hawley trade protection for making the Great Depression worse. The world industrial production peaked in June 1929. Smoot-Hawley was passed in June 1930, 12 months after peak world trade, but did not go into effect until June 1931, 24 months after the peak. By then most of the decline had already happened. Something other that tariffs caused this.

But wait, there is more. Advocates of free trade like to say trade declined 66 percent. That is true but it was 66 percent of a small number. Total trade was 6 percent of GDP before the Great Depression and declined to 2 percent. Much too small a decline to justify the boogieman status Smoot-Hawley has been given.

But then there is even more. The Smoot-Hawley trade protection was not a radical departure. At the time it was introduced the US was already the world’s most trade protected nation and had been for more than a hundred years.

In the world according to free traders the US was a free trading country until Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley got together and invented trade protection in 1930. But it is wrong! The real world experience of US trade protection is much more positive that the free traders want to admit. Trade protection began in 1828 when one of the few things Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay agreed on was that America needed protective tariffs. So they passed the “Tariff of Abomination” that was the highest tariffs we have ever had. Higher than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of a hundred years latter. These high tariffs upset the then Vice-President John C. Calhoun who set off a Constitutional crisis by urging nullification of the tariff within South Carolina. They compromised and cut the tariff from about 62 percent to about 40 percent.

Tariffs went up and down but generally drifted lower in the following years ending at about 20 percent just before the Civil War. According to free traders a trade protected economy without foreign competition should have high prices, shoddy products, and producers should have no incentive to innovate. Society should slide into mediocrity and poverty. That was never the US experience with trade protection. Contrary to free traders, the economy was growing with higher wages, lower prices, and much innovation.

After the first few months of the Civil War Congress decided to protect industry from foreign competition in war time and passed the Morrill and War tariffs which jacked tariffs up to just under 50 percent. After the war tariffs oscillated but stayed high until the first decade of the twentieth century. Again, contrary to free traders, the economy was growing with higher wages, lower prices, and much innovation. During this time we overtook free trade Great Britain.

In the first part of the twentieth century it was thought that the way to respond to industrial monopolies was to expose them to foreign competition. Tariffs were lowered to below 20 percent. That was soon abandoned in favor of anti trust legislation. By the 1920s tariffs were back in the range of 40 percent where they were when Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley introduced their new tariffs that raised tariffs to just below 60 percent.

Smoot-Hawley tariffs went into effect in June 1931 but did not last long. In 1934 Roosevelt started lowering them. When the Great Depression got worse in 1937 tariffs were long back to pre Smoot-Hawley levels. Tariffs continued to decline to current low levels.

The American experience with trade protection was a positive experience not to be feared.