Who Voted For Smoot-Hawley?

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 1994, Pages 683-690

  Callahan, Colleen M ^a   McDonald, Judith A ^a   O’Brien, Anthony Patrick ^a  

^a Bethlehem University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040096390     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700015084     Document Type: Note

References (22)

1. See E.E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (New York, 1935); and Robert Pastor, Congress and the Politics of United States Foreign Economic Policy, 1929-1976 (Berkeley, CA, 1980).
2. Barry Eichengreen, “The Political Economy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” in R.L. Ransom, P.H. Lindert, and R. Sutch, eds., Research in Economic History (Greenwich, CT, 1989), vol. 12, pp. 1–43.
3. See, for instance, the speech printed in Herbert Hoover, The Future of Our Foreign Trade (Washington, DC, 1926).
4. “Republican Platform [of 1928]” as reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (New York, 1971), vol. 3, p. 2627.
5. For Hoover's views on the Tariff, see Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920-1933 (New York, 1952), Chap. 41.
6. Eichengreen, “Political Economy,” p. 10.
7. Although Eichengreen does not specifically mention divisions between urban and rural interests, one might expect that urban interests would be protariff, whereas rural interests would be antitariff. However, party affiliation appears to have dominated all urban-rural interests. For example, only two Republicans representing urban districts voted against final passage, whereas only two Democrats representing urban districts voted in favor of final passage of the bill.
8. Only 25 Republicans are listed in Table 1. This is because we did not include William H. Sproul (from Kansas) who voted present on initial and no on final passage and Hubert H. Peavey (from Wisconsin) whose final vote was no, but whose initial vote we were unable to determine.
9. Eichengreen, “Political Economy,” p. 12.
10. We included members who were listed in the Congressional Record (June 14, 1930, pp. 10789–10790) as not voting, but paired. We counted as a Democrat the one Farmer-Labor representative.
11. Once again, we included members who were listed in the Congressional Record (May 28, 1929, p. 2106) as not voting, but paired. Sometimes a member was replaced between the initial and final votes. If the replacement was from the same party, then we proceeded as if the votes were cast by the initial member. Only James M. Beck, a Republican representing the 1st District in Pennsylvania, voted no on the first vote and yes on the second vote. He was excluded from the analysis.
12. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, Biennial Census of Manufactures: 1929, Vol. 3: Reports by States (Washington, DC, 1932).
13. We used the definitions of Congressional districts given in Kenneth Martis, The Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts: 1789-1983 (New York, 1982) and assigned industries to SIC categories using the classifications in Albert Niemi, Jr., State and Regional Patterns in American Manufacturing: 1860-1900 (Westport, CT, 1974).
14. The thrust of Eichengreen's argument is best represented by the classification of two-digit SIC industries into heavy and light manufacturing used in the analysis presented in Tables 2 and 3. If Eichengreen's coalition analysis is to be meaningfully distinguished from that of Schattschneider's log-rolling analysis, then Eichengreen's coalitions must be made up of fairly broad industry groups. However, we also performed probit and ordered probit estimations in which the SIC variables were disaggregated by industry. Including disaggregated industry variables at the two-digit SIC level didnot add significantly to the percentage of the vote correctly predicted. These results are available from the authors.
15. We also tried an alternative definition of light industry: the sum of the values for SICs 22, 23, and 31. This alternative was consistently insignificant and is excluded from our results.
16. We considered the following districts to be northern-border agriculture: all districts in the states of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine; in Washington: 4th and 5th; in Minnesota: 1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 9th; in Wisconsin: 3rd, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th; in Michigan: 4th, 7th, 10th, 11th, and 12th; in Ohio: 4th, Sth, 8th, 13th, and 17th; in Pennsylvania: 27th and 28th; and in New York: 31st, 32nd, 36th, and 37th. We also tried an alternative definition of this variable, which, in addition to the districts included in BORDER AGRICULTURE, added all of the districts in South Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona in order to include all of the districts in the states in which, according to Eichengreen (“Political Economy,” p. 8): “the foreclosures of the second half of the 1920s were most heavily concentrated. [and which were] the sources of strongest pressure for agrarian relief.” Because this alternative variable was consistently insignificant, it is not included in our results.
17. Eichengreen, “Political Economy,” p. 12.
18. The unemployment data are from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, Unemployment, Volume 1 (Washington, DC, 1931).
19. For a thorough description of how these series were generated, see Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, “Patterns of Congressional Voting,” American Journal of Political Science, 35 (Feb. 1991), pp. 228–278.
20. For a discussion of the condition index, see David A. Belsley, Edwin Kuh, and Roy E. Welsch, Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity (New York, 1980), pp. 105 and 153; and George G. Judge, et al., Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Econometrics (New York, 1988), p. 872.
21. For instance, despite the presence of the automobile industry, with the exception of one absent member, all of Michigan's representatives voted in favor of final passage.
22. The test statistic used is two times the difference between the likelihood functions, as discussed in Takeshi Amemiya, “Qualitative Response Models: A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature, 19 (Dec. 1981), pp. 1483–1536.