(Ben Stein — New York Times)
For the last 23 years or so, complete strangers have come up to me all over this country to ask if there really was such a thing as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or if I made it up.
Yes, there really was such a thing. And while it’s been the subject of some controversy for economists and historians, it also played a special role in my little life. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, sometimes called Hawley-Smoot, was the subject of a monologue I gave ad lib, just off the top of my head, in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on Stage 15 at Paramount Studios on or about Nov. 15, 1985. It stayed in the movie, and when that movie was released in 1986, that scene, my first of any size in any movie, made me a star — although a star of only cult proportions, unlike, say, a Ronald Reagan. For me, that is the primary significance of that piece of legislation.
Otherwise, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was a wildly misguided attempt by two Republican senators, Reed O. Smoot of Utah and Willis C. Hawley of a very different Oregon, and the Republican-controlled Congress to stimulate domestic production by raising (“raising or lowering ... anyone, anyone?”) tariffs on many goods from abroad. Signed reluctantly by President Herbert Hoover, who most certainly did know better, the law did not do much to ameliorate the onrushing Depression, but it did anger foreign trading partners. They slapped retaliatory tariffs on American-made goods.
World trade slumped. Read more here.
