Grand Old Protectionists
Library of Congress / National Museum of American History
By John Hendrickson
As the debate over tariffs has reignited in American political life, the Coolidge Review is taking a look back at this country’s history with tariffs. Compare John Hendrickson’s views here with Christopher Cox’s examination of American protectionism and Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s assessment.
After taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing an “America First trade policy.” This policy would include new tariffs to protect American manufacturing and labor against foreign competition. Trump was making good on his campaign promise to launch “a revival of economic nationalism.” Tariff, he said, was “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
President Trump’s embrace of protectionism represents a break from decades of free-trade consensus. Within the conservative and free-market movements, Trump’s language and actions create discomfort. Those who generally support the president tend to excuse the “tariff talk” as only a negotiating tool, while others fear that he is moving the Republican Party away from free-market principles.
But in many ways, Trump’s advocacy for tariffs marks not a rejection of the Republican Party’s heritage but a return to it.
Protectionist Since Lincoln
In promoting protectionism, Trump often invokes an earlier Republican president, William McKinley. During his 2025 inaugural address, Trump declared that McKinley “made our country very rich through tariffs.”
McKinley was hardly alone among Republicans in supporting high tariffs. Protectionism animated Republican presidential administrations from Abraham Lincoln through Herbert Hoover. One exception might have been William Howard Taft, who advocated tariff reductions in 1909. But Taft ended up signing a bill that increased tariffs on many items.
When Democrat Woodrow Wilson entered the White House in 1913, the federal government instituted the income tax and cut tariff rates. But the 1920 election brought a return of both conservatism and protectionism in the form of the Harding-Coolidge administration.
Conservatives today praise Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge for their commitment to constitutional limited government and to spending and tax reductions. Harding and Coolidge’s support for protectionism receives less attention.
Did America’s economic success in the 1920s occur despite, or because of, high tariffs?
A Return to Protectionism
The 1920 GOP platform endorsed higher tariffs for the “preservation of the home market for American labor, agriculture, and industry.” Accepting the Republican presidential nomination that year, Harding said, “I believe in the protective tariff policy and know we will be calling for its saving Americanism again.”
When he entered the White House, Harding confronted an economic crisis: the depression of 1920–21. Only a month after taking office, Harding addressed a joint session of Congress and called for reducing taxes and spending—and for a return to protectionism. “I believe in the protection of American industry, and it is our purpose to prosper America first,” he said. The president explained that the tariff would protect American agriculture and industries as well as the country’s “standards of wage and living.” Revenue from the tariff would pay a “fair share of our cost of government,” he added.
Congress answered Harding’s call with the Emergency Tariff Act of 1921 and then, the next year, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff.
When Harding died in 1923, Coolidge assumed the presidency and continued the administration’s economic agenda, including its protective tariffs. Coolidge had expressed his preference for tariffs back in 1920 in a letter to his friend Dwight Morrow. Morrow sent him some books advocating free trade, to which Coolidge replied: “My observation of protectionism is that it has been successful in practice, however unsound it may appear to be in theory. That must mean the theories have not taken account of all the facts.”
Fordney-McCumber gave the president the flexibility to lower tariff rates by as much as 50 percent. But Coolidge chose not to reduce rates. He even rejected the U.S. Tariff Commission’s recommendation to cut the tariff on Cuban sugar. The president also appointed protectionist members to that commission, whose chair, Thomas O. Marvin, was a member of the protectionist Home Market Club of Boston.
When Coolidge ran for reelection in 1924, the Republican Party platform said, “The enormous value of the protective principle has once more been demonstrated by the emergency tariff act of 1921 and the tariff act of 1922.” The Republican Campaign Text-Book called Fordney-McCumber the “greatest revenue-producing tariff ever enacted.”
Coolidge won the 1924 campaign in a landslide, and in his inaugural address, he attributed America’s economic prosperity in part to protectionism. “Under the helpful influences of restrictive immigration and a protective tariff,” the president said, “employment is plentiful, the rate of pay is high, and wage earners are in a state of contentment seldom before seen.”
Indeed, the U.S. economy grew by more than 4 percent per year in the 1920s.
Do Tariffs Help or Hurt?
Did America’s economic success in the 1920s occur despite, or because of, high tariffs?
Writing in the Coolidge Review, Christopher Cox suggests the former. Cox credits Coolidge’s focus on reducing incomes taxes and the “many advances in technology that increased worker productivity.”
Coolidge ventured a different answer after he left the White House. Writing in July 1930, Coolidge said: “For over a generation each protective tariff has changed the basis but enlarged the market for imports…. That is not saying the new tariffs promoted or retarded the increases. But the fact is higher rates did not decrease the former imports. The most reasonable explanation seems to be that protection encouraged business and a more prosperous people bought more goods abroad.”
Coolidge made these comments only weeks after President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariff rates dramatically.
Smoot-Hawley emerged as a major issue in the 1932 presidential campaign as the Great Depression deepened. Democratic nominee Franklin Roosevelt blasted Smoot-Hawley as “indefensible,” “destructive,” and “disastrous.” Even some Republicans voiced their criticisms.
Hoover and the GOP defended protectionism, however. The 1932 party platform acknowledged the need to revise certain tariff rates, especially to protect American agriculture. But the platform stated, “Adequate tariff protection is today particularly essential to the welfare of the American people.”
Coolidge staunchly defended tariffs in September 1932. He wrote: “Our only defense against the cheap production, low wages, and low standard of living which exist abroad, and our only method of maintaining our own standards, is through a protective tariff. We regard protection as a national policy, to be applied wherever it is required.”
Prescient Warnings from Protectionists
Smoot-Hawley proved to be the high-water mark for American tariffs. Many observers blame that tariff, at least in part, for turning the 1929 recession into the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley has thus become infamous, a symbol of failed protectionism.
For nearly a century after that, tariffs faded away as a major issue in American political life. But then Donald Trump embraced protectionism. Now the debate over tariffs has reignited. As Cox says, this is a debate well worth having.
Such a debate should consider the real-world effects of both the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley Tariff Acts, about which scholars disagree. Although the economy today looks different from that of the 1920s, we can still learn from ideas of that period.
The debate should also take into account the fact that protectionism proved central to Republican economic orthodoxy for decades. The conservatism of Harding and Coolidge rejected free trade.
Who was right: Harding and Coolidge, or the free traders of their day? To answer that question, it is worth considering this point: Over the past few decades, free-trade agreements have led to the loss of American manufacturing, middle-class jobs, and sovereignty. These agreements have also left the United States dependent for necessities on foreign nations, even hostile nations.
What’s more, protectionists predicted these developments in the twentieth century. In 1924, accepting his party’s presidential nomination, Coolidge warned that if protectionist policies were removed, “the result would be felt at every fireside in the land,” as “our industry would languish” and “factories would close.”
A few weeks later, President Coolidge said that goods could be “produced much cheaper” overseas because American workers earned higher wages. “Under free trade,” he added, the only way America could keep up with foreign competition would be to lower wages. “We shall not be misled by any appeal for cheap goods, if we remember that this was completely answered by President McKinley when he stated that cheap goods make cheap men.”
In 1932, during a campaign speech for Hoover, Coolidge said: “An independent nation ought to keep within its own control the authority to determine its own revenues and regulate its own commerce. Reciprocal trade agreements on any extended scale would involve our surrender of our independence on these two vital points.”
Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, offered his own prescient warning about the effects of globalization. During President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, Hoover anticipated the impact of continual tariff reductions on American communities. “Thousands of villages and towns would be deprived of their employment,” he said. “Their schools, churches, and skills would be greatly decimated.”
It is time for Americans, and especially conservatives, to take protectionist ideas seriously.
John Hendrickson is the policy director for Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation.
For other historical perspectives on tariffs, see Christopher Cox’s essay and Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s assessment.