Sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, it was signed by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930.

[4] The Act and tariffs imposed by America's trading partners in retaliation were major factors of the reduction of American exports and imports by 67% during the Great Depression.

[6] The League of Nations' World Economic Conference met at Geneva in 1927, concluding in its final report that "the time has come to put an end to tariffs, and to move in the opposite direction".

One sixth to one quarter of farmland, which had been devoted to feeding horses and mules, was freed up, contributing to a surplus in farm produce.

[8] As the global economy entered the first stages of the Great Depression in late 1929, the main goal of the US was to protect its jobs and farmers from foreign competition.

During the 1928 United States presidential election, one of Herbert Hoover's promises was to help beleaguered farmers by increasing tariffs on agricultural products.

[20] Nations other than Canada that enacted retaliatory tariffs included Cuba, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland.

[4] In the two-volume series published by the US Bureau of the Census, "The Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition", tariff rates have been represented in two forms.

[28][29] The Great Depression was already in motion before Smoot-Hawley, mainly due to financial instability, falling demand, and poor banking practices.

However, the tariff worsened the crisis by shrinking global trade, hurting farmers, and reducing employment in export-dependent industries.

After winning the election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the now-Democratic Congress passed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934.

After World War II, that understanding supported a push towards multilateral trading agreements that would prevent similar situations in the future.

While the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 focused on foreign exchange and did not directly address tariffs, those involved wanted a similar framework for international trade.

President Harry S. Truman launched this process in November 1945 with negotiations for the creation of a proposed International Trade Organization (ITO).

Adding a multilateral "most-favored-nation" component to that of reciprocity, the GATT served as a framework for the gradual reduction of tariffs over the subsequent half century.

[11] In April 2009, then-Representative Michele Bachmann made news when, during a speech, she referred to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff as "the Hoot–Smalley Act", misattributed its signing to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and blamed it for the Great Depression.

[40] Prior to 2016, the Tariff Act provided that "[a]ll goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in any foreign country by convict labor or/and forced labor or/and indentured labor under penal sanctions shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States" with a specific exception known as the "consumptive demand exception", which allowed forced labor-based imports of goods where United States domestic production was not sufficient to meet consumer demand.

[42] In the 1986 film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ben Stein, playing a high school economics teacher, references the tariff in a lecture to his students.