There is a popular meme going around the internet. The caption to the picture reads, “We’ve done this mass tariff thing 3 times in American history. 1828, 1930, 2025. All spaced about a 100 years apart because everyone who remembers the last one needs to be dead for the next one to happen. The last two caused depressions. This one will totally make us rich though.”
I used to almost always say, “Make your own decisions about issues like tariffs, but make them with the correct information.” As far as this meme and its information goes, historically speaking, it just does not hold water.
I love teaching about the 1828 tariff. For one, it has the best name ever: The Tariff of Abominations. Secondly, while it is the ultimate example of political maneuvering gone wrong, the 1828 tariff did not cause of the Panic of 1837.
In 1828 President John Quincy Adams planned to run for a second term. His opponents, under the leadership of Adams’ vice president, John C. Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren, came up with a scheme to hurt his chance for reelection. While Calhoun and Van Buren were anti-tariff, they proposed in Congress to pass a tariff so high that even pro-tariff ex-Federalist Republicans, New Englanders, and Adams would reject it. They could then blame Adams and these groups for the tariff’s death. However, the plan fell apart when it passed through Congress. Adams felt the tariff was too high but also constitutional and so he passed it into law.
At that point, the Calhoun-Van Buren group attacked the president for passing such a high tariff — the very one they created — calling it “The Tariff of Abominations.” Calhoun even went as far as writing the South Carolina Exposition and Protest (an anonymously written work protesting the tariff which Calhoun later admitted to writing) in which he stated it was legal for South Carolina to nullify the tariff in that state. The only reason Calhoun did not follow through with his threat was that he knew Andrew Jackson would probably beat Adams for the presidency and if Jackson won, he would remove the offensive tariff.
The ploy bit Calhoun in the behind when Jackson won. But knowing how important the tariff was to New England, a section of the country in which Jackson had struggled to garner support, he left the tariff in place. This led to the Nullification Crisis that almost caused a civil war as South Carolina finally decided to nullify the tariff. Before war could break out, Congress passed a compromise tariff in 1833 that was much more palatable to all sides.
Several years later, in 1837, our nation did fall into one of the worst depressions in history. Jackson was primarily responsible for this economic disaster when he purposely pulled all the nation’s money out of the Second Bank of the United States causing bank collapses and an economic downturn. There were several bad decisions that led to the 1837 Panic, but the 1828 tariff was not one of them.
The second tariff on the meme is the 1930 tariff, better known as “The Smoot–Hawley Tariff.” See? Tariff of Abominations is a much better name. While I might be nitpicking here, but a tariff passed in June of 1930 cannot be responsible for a depression that began in October of 1929. While many economists believe that Smoot-Hawley tariff made the depression worse, it was passed as a measure to support American businesses from the effects of the Great Depression. When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, one of his platform planks was tariffs on agricultural goods because farmers had been suffering since the end of WWI.
Farmers had a boom time during the war, as they had to feed all the world’s soldiers, but when the soldiers all returned home, there was suddenly a surplus. Hoover believed American farmers would benefit from agricultural tariffs. When the depression began, men in his party like Senator Reed Smoot and Congressman Willis Hawley used Hoover’s support on ag tariffs to push through massive tariffs on most products to protect American companies.
While Hoover was actually against high tariffs, like Adams a hundred years earlier, he signed it into law because it was not unconstitutional, and he had a great deal of pressure from his own party to pass it. The effect of Smoot-Hawley was tariff wars. America’s trade partners put tariffs on American goods, jacking up prices for everyone in a time where people were losing their jobs. So, while the tariff did more harm than good, it still cannot be blamed on causing the depression.
One important law was created on the heels of Smoot-Hawley. Two years after the tariff was passed, Democrats swept the elections including adding Franklin D. Roosevelt as president. Part of the Democratic success was a reaction to Smoot-Hawley. With the Democrats in charge, they passed the Reciprocal Tariff Agreement Act in 1934, which among many things allowed the president — without the need of congressional approval — to adjust tariffs by 50%. This was one of our country’s first big steps in turning over tariff policy to the president and away from Congress. FDR used the RTAA to reduce tariffs during the depression, and its passage is considered the end of protectionist economic policies. Tariffs have mostly lowered in the years since. Until now.
So, while I am still not at a place to make an argument about tariffs, I am in a place to say be careful what you read on the internet. Remember what Abraham Lincoln said, “Not everything online is true.” So, make your arguments, just make them with correct, factual information.
James Finck is a professor of American history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@gmail.com.
