The role of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (aka Smoot-Hawley Tariff) in causing the Great Depression has been an ongoing subject of controversy for close to a century. Ron Batchelder and I wrote a paper (“Debt, Deflation and the Great Depression”) published in this volume (Money and Banking: The American Experience) that offered an explanation of the mechanism by which the tariff contributed to the Great Depression. That paper was written before and inspired another paper “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depression: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassell“) I am now revising the paper for republication, and here is the new version of the relevant section discussing the Hawley-Smoot Tariff.
Monetary disorder was not the only legacy of World War I. The war also left a huge burden of financial obligations in its wake. The European allies had borrowed vast sums from the United States to finance their…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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