The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Raises Duties as World Trade Collapses
A bill meant to help farmers becomes a symbol of beggar-thy-neighbor economics
Quick facts
- Formal name
- Tariff Act of 1930
- Original purpose
- Raise tariffs to protect American farmers
- Outcome
- Broad tariff increases and foreign retaliation
- Debate
- Scholars disagree on how much it deepened the Depression
What happened
The Tariff Act of 1930, known as the Smoot-Hawley tariff after its congressional sponsors, began as a promise by Herbert Hoover during the 1928 campaign to raise duties on farm imports and protect struggling American farmers. Once the revision began, industrial interest groups flooded Congress with requests, and a bill meant for agriculture became a broad increase in tariffs across the economy. Signed in 1930, it entrenched the high protectionism of the earlier Fordney-McCumber tariff at the very moment the world economy was sliding into depression. Other nations retaliated with tariffs of their own, and international trade contracted drastically over the following years.
Why it matters
Smoot-Hawley became a lasting symbol of the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s, in which countries tried to protect their own economies in ways that damaged everyone's. It deepened the international dimension of the Depression by helping choke off world trade, and it hardened later economists' consensus that closing borders to trade during a downturn makes the downturn worse.
How we know
The legislative history and the tariff's effects are documented by the U.S. State Department Office of the Historian, which draws on the record of interwar U.S. trade policy, and the source is candid that scholars still disagree about how much of the trade collapse the tariff itself caused.
Sources
- U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Protectionism in the Interwar Period · Primary source (author-declared)history.state.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Protectionism in the Interwar Period (Smoot-Hawley section) · Primary source (author-declared)history.state.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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