All politics is local and trade policy is politics: Congressional consideration of GATT and the ITO

This dissertation examines the failure of the Truman administration to obtain Congressional approval for the State Department's plan to expand the bilateral Reciprocal Trade Program (RTP) into a multilateral liberalized trading system regulated by the International Trade Organization (ITO) or GATT. In addition to the published proceedings on the issue, it uses material from manuscript collections of key individuals in the administration and Congress.; Organizationally, the dissertation follows the legislative fights over trade policy, which primarily took the form of renewals of the RTP. In the 1945 renewal, the administration narrowly won approval to continue the RTP by promising not to lower trade barriers that would injure American industry. Members of Congress took this to mean that trade policy would not harm their constituents.; As the administration moved forward with its plans, Congress became increasingly alarmed. Replacing the RTP with the more comprehensive programs of GATT and the ITO had not been mentioned in 1945, and members of Congress felt misled. The administration continued to deceive Congress about its intentions for trade policy and engaged in an uncompromising drive to retain absolute authority over trade policy in the executive branch.; These actions and attitudes of the administration poisoned relations between the President and Congress so much that Congress explicitly rejected the GATT and the ITO. Even more alarming to the administration, Congress imposed mandates on how the executive could administer the RTP. These included bans on trade with the Soviet Union and specific guidelines about how low tariffs could be reduced.; The conventional wisdom on postwar American trade policy is that the U.S. pursued a course of global trade liberalization after World War II. While some scholars do lament the lost opportunity to create a global liberal trading system caused by the ITO's demise, almost all gloss over the years between that event and the beginning of substantial tariff reductions in GATT rounds of the 1960s. This dissertation's purpose is to highlight the fact that protectionist attitudes were able to exercise a great deal of control over trade policy during the early years of the cold war. This control manifest itself in a reassertion of legislative authority over trade and tariff policy, which reflected the broader struggle set off by the New Deal of how much power the executive branch of government should have.