ABSTRACT
The politics of the tariff had once again delivered the White House to the Republican Party, and President Hoover soon requested Congressional action on his campaign pledges. As the Smoot-Hawley Bill, increasingly laden with additional special provisions to protect more and more American industries, worked its way through the Congress, foreign governments became ever more attentive to how the provisions would affect their economies. In Reed Smoot's view, had the United States not introduced tariffs, foreign surplus production would be 'dumped' into the American marketplace, causing even greater unemployment, further depressing wages and lowering living standards. Although the Democrats who opposed the Smoot-Hawley Act were often ambivalent free traders themselves, the Act entered the mythology of the New Deal as an example of how the feckless economic policies of the Hoover administration had contributed to and exacerbated the Great Depression.
