April 7, 2025 – As we currently find ourselves led by our national leaders into a full-blown trade war, the worst in decades, it is important to look at the last massive trade war we were in, and how it nearly destroyed America, triggering The Great Depression and World War II.

The story starts before President Herbert Hoover took office in 1929. His predecessor, President Calvin Coolidge, and his administration took a series of steps that arguably set up our economy for a serious recession, masked by the so-called “Roaring 20s” economic boom. Yet agriculture lagged behind the country as family farms struggled under those economic conditions.

Elected by a landslide in 1928, President Herbert Hoover and Congressional Republicans initially sought to protect the agricultural sector with a modest tariff in 1929. But like current times, those GOP leaders couldn’t resist piling taxes on trade on everything in 1929.

An A.I. site will naively try to convince you that the massive tariff bill led by Utah Senator Reid Smoot and Oregon Congressman Willis Hawley (chairs of the powerful Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees, respectively) couldn’t have started the Great Depression, since Hoover signed it into law in June of 1930, after the market crash the previous year. But this shows why you can’t rely on robots for your thinking.

First of all, the House of Representatives passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in May of 1929. Its passage by a Republican Senate and a GOP White House was a foregone conclusion. Second, other countries slapped with massive tariffs didn’t wait for the bill to officially become law. They knew what was coming, and passed their own big tariff bills to retaliate. The trade war was on, triggering the massive Stock Market Crash in late 1929. Smoot and Hawley, and Hoover all lost their elections in humiliating fashion, but by then the damage was done.

Economists and business leaders desperately tried to get the stubborn President and Congressional leaders to see reason, to no avail. Things got worse as global trade ground to a halt. Economies throughout the world collapsed, triggering fascist takeovers in several places, as well as a rise in military occupations, because that’s what fascists do. That’s where World War II comes in. And bitter feelings over crashed economies kept the opponents of fascism from forming an alliance that could have stood up to Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their Axis allies, until it was almost too late.

During World War II, the Allied leaders met and designed that trade wars, currency devaluations to sell products, and right-wing authoritarians (and left-wing communism) had to be stopped. That’s why those leaders created Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade regime (and later the WTO), triggering postwar economic prosperity that lasted until the Great Recession, a slow recovery, and the pandemic. Yet the formula for success, as well as failure, is clear. It’s a recipe Republicans once honored, that attracted me to the party while I was in school.

Now we’ve got the rise of populists across the globe who seek both tariffs and militarism in their foreign policy, who seem willing to end prosperity as long as it fits their narrow view of the world, and their desire for glorification. Hopefully our party leaders can bury the hatchet and work together to stop a return to the madness of 1929, before it returns with a vengeance.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.  His views are his own.  He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.