Political Chatter

"As I like to tell the president when he says he likes tariffs, I try to remind him that Smoot-Hawley brought about the Great Depression, brought about Adolf Hitler, brought about World War II, brought about 60 million people losing their lives as a result of it." 

-- Senator Chuck Grassley (Rep, Iowa)

Well, lets take a handle to this and discuss Chuck's poor vision of history.

There's at least a dozen 'warning' signals that were occurring from 1920 to 1929 that massive collapse of Wall Street was going to occur.  Various signals were taken and explained to the major banks, Senators, Congressmen, the Fed, and the Presidents.  None of them reacted.  You can count through dozen-odd speculation events that went into stock, real estate, and bonds. 

The Smoot-Hawley Act?  The idea (roughly a year into the depression era) was to prevent cheap products from overseas from coming to the US market.  In a sense, it was to protect US jobs.  If the priority was NOT US jobs, then this could have been avoided, and some other fake stance by the House and Senate could have easily been accomplished.

The suggestion by economic historians of some great 'evil' being done with the Act?  The Depression was already into the first entire stage, and nothing that Hoover had done....had accomplished much of anything in terms of resolving this issue.  Action by the Fed?  Almost non-existent.....they were the last people on Earth who wanted to resolve the Depression.  Some felt that the dire warnings for almost a decade....now had to be dished out in painful amounts to prevent the massive amount of speculation that had occurred.

As for this bringing about Hitler?  No.  There are three key observations here:

1.  The Weimar Republic was one of the weakest democracy platforms ever created.  It was doomed from day one. 

2.  Hitler was already enjoying from the 1925 era on....the great benefit of radio.  He had a platform to pump out speeches, and talk about suffering of the 'people'. 

3.  All that hostility and resentment by vets of Germany over WW I?  No one ever wants to go and discuss their hostility and how that brewed for almost an entire decade.

Senator Grassley and his assessment?  Mostly worthless.  But this is why the general public has such a low opinion of the bulk of GOP Senators and Congressmen in DC.