Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act during the early Great Depression market crisis.
Hoover, the 31st president of the United States, signed the law on June 17, 1930. It raised U.S. tariffs on thousands of imported goods, following legislation sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley.
The act came after the 1929 stock-market crash, when the economy was already weakening. Many economists and trading partners criticized the tariff increases, and other countries imposed retaliatory duties. World trade subsequently contracted sharply during the Depression, although historians debate how much of that contraction can be assigned to Smoot–Hawley itself.
The law is often mistakenly treated as the direct cause of the 1929 crash. It was enacted months afterward. The crash and the tariff belonged to the same broad crisis, but they were different events with different immediate mechanisms.