Trump’s tariffs are the toughest since the Great Depression. The dangers we’ve forgotten.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 is blamed for deepening the Great Depression. Don’t tell that to the Trump administration, which just unveiled the toughest tariffs in almost a century.

Investors see the new tariffs as threatening the economy, and stocks have gyrated wildly in recent days. President Donald Trump has slapped tariffs of 25% on goods from Mexico and Canada, plus an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports, with a threat of more to come. Every fresh tidbit of news sends jumpy traders in a new direction.

But, then, who can blame them? Smoot-Hawley happened decades before they were born. Enacted eight months after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and pushed by President Herbert Hoover as necessary protection for American farmers and workers, Smoot-Hawley was actually a product of the precrash good times. When congressional discussions began in 1928, the stock market was reaching new highs almost daily, much as it has in 2023 and 2024.

Smoot-Hawley was a Republican proposal, though Congress split along regional lines, with debate centering on the eternal question: Are the protections that tariffs provide to workers and industry worth the price increases that everyone else must pay? In April 1929, amid congressional hearings on the tariff, The Wall Street Journal found all the arguments unconvincing. But it did come up with one conclusion, as true today as it was then. “[N]othing and nobody anywhere is without a tangible interest in the tariff question," the Journal wrote, “not an industry, or a business, or a home, or an investment anywhere can escape the effects produced by changes in tariffs." A tariff is a tax placed on imports and paid by domestic importers.