Her great-grandfather was behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. She thinks Trump’s tariffs are 'terrible.'

Carey Stewart Cezar, a retired nurse who lives in Baltimore, watched with dismay Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports.

Carey Stewart Cezar, a retired nurse who lives in Baltimore, watched with dismay Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports.

Cezar voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election and opposes Trump’s economic policies. But she said she has another reason to be skeptical of Trump’s tariffs: She is a descendant of one of the legislators behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a law that many economic historians believe worsened the Great Depression.

“I think it’s a terrible idea and potentially devastating,” Cezar, 70, said in a phone interview Wednesday, a few hours after Trump announced plans to impose duties on goods brought into the United States from other countries. “I think people don’t remember all the harm caused by tariffs in our history.”

Carey Cezar — holding a photo of her mother as a baby alongside Rep. Willis C. Hawley — kept various news clippings about her great-grandfather.Courtesy Carey CezarCezar’s great-grandfather was Rep. Willis C. Hawley, an Oregon Republican who sponsored the 1930 tariff act with Sen. Reed Smoot, a Utah Republican. The act, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law roughly a year into the Great Depression, increased duties, set off a trade war and — in the eyes of many historians — aggravated the effects of the era’s economic downturn.

The law was “one of the most controversial tariff acts ever enacted by Congress,” Doug Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, wrote in 2020. (Irwin said Wednesday on X that Trump’s expansive tariffs are “bigger than Smoot-Hawley.”)

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/smoot-hawley-tariff-act-relative-rcna199405

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