Key Figures in the History of Tariffs: Hamilton, List, Cobden, Smoot, and Hull

Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755-1804)

As the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton submitted his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to Congress in 1791. It is the foundational American statement of the infant industry argument: new domestic industries facing established foreign competitors may never reach efficient scale without temporary protection, subsidies, or bounties. Hamilton also valued tariffs as revenue for a federal government with few other sources. Congress did not adopt his program wholesale, but the report supplied the intellectual scaffolding for a century of American protectionism and has been cited by developing economies ever since. Economists still treat the infant industry case as the most defensible argument for protection, with the caveat that temporary protection rarely stays temporary.

Friedrich List (1789-1846)

A German economist who spent years in the United States and returned to publish The National System of Political Economy in 1841. List accepted that free trade maximizes output between economies at similar stages of development, but argued that a country still building its manufacturing base needs protection to develop “productive powers” before opening up. He advocated a German customs union and railway network, and his ideas influenced industrial policy in Germany, Japan, and later much of the developing world. List is the most systematic theorist of the developmental case for tariffs, and remains the standard counterweight to Smith and Ricardo in trade policy debates.

Richard Cobden (1804-1865) and John Bright (1811-1889)

Cobden, a Manchester calico manufacturer, and Bright, a Rochdale mill owner and orator, founded and led the Anti-Corn Law League from 1838. They pioneered techniques that now look entirely modern: mass pamphleting, national speaking tours, and organized electoral pressure. Their campaign against grain import restrictions succeeded in 1846 when Robert Peel carried repeal. Cobden went on to negotiate the 1860 commercial treaty with France that bears his name alongside Michel Chevalier’s, cutting tariffs on both sides and spreading reductions through most-favored-nation clauses. Cobden linked free trade explicitly to peace between nations, an association that ran through liberal thought for the next century.

Reed Smoot (1862-1941) and Willis Hawley (1864-1941)

Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon, chairman of House Ways and Means, sponsored the tariff act signed in June 1930. What began as relief for American farmers expanded through legislative logrolling into broad increases across many categories of imports. More than a thousand economists signed a public appeal urging a veto. Trading partners retaliated and international trade contracted severely in the following years. Their names became permanent shorthand for the risks of protectionism, and the episode directly motivated the delegation of tariff-negotiating authority to the executive branch in 1934.

Cordell Hull (1871-1955)

Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944 and the driving force behind the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, which authorized the President to negotiate mutual tariff reductions with other countries without a separate Senate treaty vote for each. This procedural change moved U.S. trade policy away from the logrolling that had produced Smoot-Hawley and toward negotiated liberalization. Hull believed, like Cobden, that open commerce reduced the likelihood of war, and his approach shaped the postwar institutional design that produced the GATT. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for his role in establishing the United Nations.