Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression.

• Author: Boudreaux, Donald J.
• Position: Book review

Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression

By Douglas A. Irwin

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Pp. 256. $24.95 cloth.

Douglas Irwin opens his book on the Smoot-Hawley tariff with a 1993 photo of Vice President Al Gore introducing Larry King and Ross Perot to the work of the late Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. The occasion was a public debate on Larry King Live between Gore, a proponent of the then-pending North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Perot, a politically ambitious businessman who, because he mistook his personal fortune as evidence that he understands economics, never bothered to think seriously about economics and therefore opposed. NAFTA on grounds that American trade with lower-wage Mexicans would impoverish Americans.

No doubt Messrs. King and Perot had already heard of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Yet it is equally without doubt that neither King nor Perot--nor, I suspect, Gore himself--knew more than a handful of pop-knowledge tidbits about this infamous tariff hike that was enacted in 1930.

Irwin's little book--its text comprises only 226 short pages--would teach all three men a great deal about the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Only some of what they would learn would be consistent with their pop knowledge of the tariff; everything they would learn would deepen their understanding of trade, history, and politics.

This praise, however, is much too faint. Irwin's outstanding book will teach even well-informed scholars a great deal about the history and politics that produced the Smoot-Hawley tariff as well as about its economic and political consequences.

Read Irwin's book for the important details. Here is a summary sketch of the informative history you will find in Peddling Protectionism.

As modern protectionists never tire of reminding us, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America was no free-trading nation (if by "free-trading nation" we mean one with no tariffs imposed on domestic consumers who buy goods from producers in other countries; free trade did reign within this vast transcontinental nation). Uncle Sam's tariffs, though, were a constant source of political discord. Industrialized northeasterners generally favored tariffs--and voted Republican; farmers in the rural South and West did not--and voted Democrat.

Overwhelmingly because of mechanization and advances in chemistry and horticulture, farmers throughout America--who were still almost...