Even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs convulse the market and threaten higher prices, some Democrats have been hesitant to fully condemn them. Populists in both parties have long called for protectionist measures, after all; do they really want to risk a working-class backlash by running too hard against them now?
But politicians should be careful in assuming that voters receptive to these kinds of appeals in the past will line up behind Trump’s agenda. While we tend to look at tariffs through the lens of more recent economic battles, our country also experienced long periods in which voters — especially in downtrodden rural communities — rallied behind politicians who promised to tear them down. Those politics could return.
Opposition to protective tariffs was part of the original populist movement, which emerged during the Gilded Age as a response to massive levels of inequality, economic injustice and human suffering. It reached its electoral pinnacle in 1896 with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan — dubbed the “Great Commoner” — as the Democratic Party’s nominee.
The populists’ mission was to combat the political and economic power of the oligarchs and uplift the common people. To this end, their agenda included curbing monopoly power, introducing a graduated income tax, establishing an eight-hour workday, nationalizing the railroads and setting up a rural credit system. They opposed deflation engendered by the gold standard — which might have provided stability for financiers and industrialists, but hurt farmers, workers and debtors, who favored minting silver currency as well as gold to reflate the economy.
But while Bryan is best known for his “Cross of Gold” speech, populist politicians were also opposed to a protective tariff, which was an integral part of the Republican Party platform and a major source of revenue for the federal government. Bryan’s first major speech in Congress was delivered in opposition to a tariff, which he warned would raise costs for manufacturers and “press with accumulated weight upon the person who uses the finished product.”
Bryan rejected the argument that tariffs would lead to higher wages, but he did believe they would lead to cronyism and corruption. Not only did they increase prices for the common people and small businesses, he and other populists argued, but they boosted profits and further entrenched monopoly power among industrialists in the big cities. The face of these grievances was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in history, who called in the Pinkertons — a private militia — to violently crush a strike at his Homestead mill. Populists linked his behavior to tariffs, arguing he refused to pass on the windfall he reaped from trade protections to his workers.
Facing William McKinley in 1896 — a Republican candidate financed massively by big business whom Trump has cited as a model for his trade policy — Bryan lost the election. It was a tough year to run as a Democrat, as the country was facing a deep economic recession under then-President Grover Cleveland. But part of the problem was that he appealed more to farmers crippled by debt and deflation than to industrial workers in rising trades. His staunch evangelical Protestantism also proved off-putting to many immigrants, including Irish and German Catholics.
Bryan ran for president twice more, in 1900 and 1908, on a wider array of progressive policies, including public ownership of the railroads and opposition to American imperial adventures. He lost each time. But he did manage to permanently change the texture of the Democratic Party, paving the way for the eventual adoption of the New Deal in the 1930s.
Along the way, both populists and progressives continued to push for tariff reduction, gaining political momentum. Efforts to enact a federal income tax, which culminated with the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, were motivated in part by a desire to reduce tariffs. The argument was based on fairness: Tariffs are regressive taxes, imposing greater burdens on the poor, while an income tax with a high threshold and progressive rates taxes the rich more. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Congress paired a large cut in the tariff with an income tax that only applied to a thin sliver of the population.
Tariff reform was also part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Following the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 — which provoked massive retaliation and worsened the Great Depression — Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was determined to chart a new course. In 1934, he shepherded through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which gave the president the power to negotiate trade deals on a bilateral basis. Roosevelt took advantage of this to sign 20 agreements covering 60 percent of U.S. trade over the next five years. This set the groundwork for the postwar General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which gradually reduced trade barriers over the following decades. In turn, this formed the backdrop to the “thirty golden years” of 1945 to 1975 — marked by record-setting economic growth, low inequality, full employment and the absence of major financial crises. All told, free trade became part of the panoply of progressive, social democratic policies.
As the years went on, deindustrialization and the rise of foreign competitors tore down this consensus, and tariffs became associated with labor unions, populism and “Buy American” nationalism. But the lessons of the past still resonate today as we grapple with the effect of Trump’s tariffs. As in the Gilded Age, we face high inequality, weak worker power, and a tight nexus between business and politics. Another oligarch, Elon Musk, is also a union-buster who could benefit from tariffs as well as from the president’s tax plans — and he enjoys a degree of political influence that Carnegie could only have dreamed of. If workers come to see new tariffs as an unfair burden imposed by an administration packed with billionaires, Democrats could reap the political rewards.