| This project relates how American government, politics, and society involved themselves with the diplomacy and economics of international trade in the 1930s. Specifically, it looks at the Roaring Twenties, the economic crisis of 1929, the Great Depression in the world trade market, and President Herbert Hoover's Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. Additionally, it considers the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 (which liberalized foreign trade) as a part of the total New Deal under Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Franklin Roosevelt. It concludes that free trade in the 1930s is an under-appreciated aspect of the decade, its economic recovery, the diplomacy before the Second World War, the war itself, and the nature of the postwar world. |
