America was a staunchly protectionist country for most of its history before World War II
The Trump White House on Friday ramped up tariffs on billions of dollars of Chinese goods as talks to resolve a tense standoff over trade dragged on — resorting to a weapon once used regularly by American leaders.
The tariff of 1789 was designed to raise money for the new federal government, slash Revolutionary War debt and protect early-stage American industries from foreign competition. “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth,” a young politician named Abraham Lincoln said in 1847. Later, as the country’s 16th president, Lincoln rejected free trade and jacked up tariffs during the Civil War to pay for the North’s military campaigns.
The infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 came to be seen as a disastrous policy that spurred other nations to erect tit-for-tat trade barriers and exacerbated the global depression. By the middle of the decade, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt began to undo the damage.
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