Most educated Americans will know about New Deal initiatives like Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Labor Relations Act, but fewer will naturally associate Roosevelt with free trade. That’s partly because the coupling of the cause of labor and the cause of free trade seems odd today, but the Roosevelt administration began the gradual liberalization of American trade that lasted from the 1930s until, well, this past Wednesday. (Not quite, but this was a dramatic reversal.) In 1934, President Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act into law, which allowed the president to negotiate bilateral reductions in tariffs with trading partners. This was an amendment of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, whose onerous trade restrictions many economists believe deepened the Great Depression. Previously, Congress held much of the authority over trade agreements, but the RTAA allowed the executive wide latitude to amend tariffs. The idea was that the president, as nationally elected, would be less likely to be captured by sectional business interests that would resist the type of trade liberalization that might help the whole country. Ironically, it was the same process of delegation to the executive that allowed Trump to unilaterally blow up world trade. FDR and his advisors believed freeing up trade would help stagnant American industry by giving them an easier time exporting their goods.
Of course, things are not always so high-minded or clear in reality: the wily FDR had said on the campaign trail that protections would likely stay in place, which no doubt reassured nervous workers and bosses in the teeth of the Depression, but it wasn’t all campaigning: FDR’s “brains trust,” his special advisors on how to fight the Depression, contained some recalcitrant economic nationalists. Then there were the Democratic party’s constituents to think about; Democrats had long been the “anti-tariff” party, representing their own sectional interests, particularly in the South, that always favored low tariffs. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson describes the New Deal coalition as a “historic bloc” where the hegemonic forces were “capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks” whose businesses inclined them to foreign trade: