And the 1920s ended with a very different law, an effort to protect American farmers from foreign competition, which failed so spectacularly, it's now practically a joke. Here's Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Anyone? A tariff bill, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which anyone raised or lowered, raised tariffs in

an effort to... In

the film, the Smoot-Hawley tariff is played for laughs. But for reasons I don't think I have to spell out for this audience, the motivations and outcomes of America's most infamous tariff have special resonance today. The 1920s and the 2020s share a kinship. 100 years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of technological splendor and profound anxiety, a familiar cocktail, albeit from an era where cocktails were illegal. The era's young people felt uniquely besieged by global forces. Quote, my whole generation is restless, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise. A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success. Grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken, end quote. It was an era of significant media innovation, especially for that periodical called The Magazine. Advertising revenues for magazines increased 500% in the 1920s, and the decade's new publications included Reader's Digest in 1922, Time Magazine in 1923, and The New Yorker, 1925. America was rich, even compared to other rich countries. According to the historian Bill Bryson, every year in the 1920s, America added more new phones than Britain possessed in total. America made 80% of the world's movies and 85% of its cars. The state of Kansas alone in 1927 had more cars than the nation of France. Our kitchens and our houses were changing as much as our garages. Demand was surging for new devices called refrigerators and washing machines and vacuum cleaners and radio sets. In another historical echo, it was a golden age of young men gambling. Stock investing took off and many young people, especially men, bought stocks on margin, borrowing cash to speculate. Their fortunes rose and rose until in the crash of 1929, they collapsed. America was changing, and change always implies a kind of loss. We were moving toward cars and cities and manufacturing, and that meant we were moving away from horses, from farmland, from agriculture. Farming was left behind in the roaring 20s economically, but that is very different from saying that it was left behind politically. And so in 1929, just months before the stock market collapsed that would kick off the Great Depression. A small group of congressmen, led by Willis C. Hawley of Oregon, got thinking about a new piece of legislation that would help restore farmers to the glory that they deserved. The idea was to create a great big import tax that would protect American farmers and help them compete in the modern economy. One year later, Hawley's name would be emblazoned on one of the most infamous pieces of legislation in American history. And so the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was born. Today's guest is Douglas Irwin, an economist and historian at Dartmouth University, and a great expert on the economic debates of the Depression. We talk about the economic motivations of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the congressional debates that shaped it, the president who signed it, and the legacy it left. And we talk about the economic instinct to preserve the past, an instinct that has never gone away in American history. And the profound irony that some efforts to return America to its former glory can have the unintended effect of robbing America of a richer future. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain History. Douglas Irwin, welcome to the show. Thanks. It's very nice to be

here.

So let's get settled in the 1920s. The economy is experiencing significant sectoral shifts. America was born as a farming economy, but agriculture is fading as a share of employment in the 1920s. The manufacturing sector is surging. Construction is surging. The stock market is surging. What should we know about the U.S. on the eve of the October 1929 market crash that really prepares us for the story of the Smoot-Hawley tariff? When

we think of the 1920s, we think about the roaring 20s. We think about the jitterbug. We think about electrification. Cars are proliferating in the economy. Things seem dynamic, but not all as well, of course. And you pointed your finger on exactly the sector that's not doing well. It's still a large sector of the U.S. economy at the time. I think about a third of the labor force was in agriculture. And this was a holdover or hangover from World War I. So during World War I, obviously, there's a great conflict in Europe. The U.S. is sort of the breadbasket of the world. We're exporting a lot of our farm produce. Farmers are borrowing a lot of money to expand their operations, to buy new equipment, to get new land under cultivation. And the war suddenly comes to an end. Commodity prices fall because commerce is restored in Europe. They don't need our imports quite as much. They go take the battlefields and put them back into agricultural production. And farmers are stuck. They're stuck with these huge debts, lower farm prices. And throughout the 1920s, they're really lagging. It's a sort of a shrinking sector of the economy, still the migration from the rural countryside into cities for work. And the story of Smoot-Hawley is a story that starts with agriculture.