Who Voted For Smoot-Hawley?

Abstract

Apart from the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff bill is probably the most infamous piece of legislation in U.S. history. Despite Smoot-Hawley's notoriety, explanations for the bill's passage are scarce. Two of the best-known accounts are the early analysis of E. E. Schattschneider-who saw the bill as the result of out-of-control log-rolling-and the more recent account of Robert Pastor-who believes that the Republicans capitalized on their landslide victory in the 1928 elections to carry out their long-standing commitment to raising tariff rates across the board.' Barry Eichengreen's recent paper provides a thoughtful analysis of these earlier explanations and concludes by identifying the economic coalition he believes was responsible for passing the bill.2 Assessing the validity of these accounts is difficult, however, without an analysis of the actual vote on the bill. This article presents a simple model of the vote that can be used to distinguish between the various explanations of why Smoot-Hawley passed. Our results from estimating this model indicate, rather surprisingly, that contrary to Eichengreen's suggestions-and contrary to much other recent work that shows economic interests to be of great importance in explaining votes in Congress-Pastor's argument that Smoot-Hawley was the result of the Republicans implementing their 1928 party platform appears to be correct. There is not much dispute that the Republicans ran a strongly protariff campaign in 1928. Herbert Hoover had long been in favor of a protective tariff and as Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations had espoused the view that the United States should largely confine its imports to those products that could not be produced domestically.3 Although Hoover focused on increases in agricultural duties during the campaign, the discussion of tariff revision in the 1928 Republican platform entailed broader increases: