Cordell Hull

As secretary of state, Cordell Hull made tariff reduction an explicit political project. The Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930 had raised rates and sharply cut international trade; the reciprocal trade agreements were the low-tariff Democrats' answer, and the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, enacted on 12 June 1934, authorized the president to negotiate tariff cuts of up to 50 percent in return for equivalent reductions abroad. Its novelty lay in procedure as well as economics: it tied U.S. reductions to reciprocal foreign cuts and allowed approval by simple majorities in both houses instead of the two-thirds Senate majority required for treaty ratification, in effect transferring part of Congress's tariff power to the executive. Whether Roosevelt or Congress foresaw that consequence remains a matter of historical debate, but the structure left presidents more inclined to lower tariffs than Congress.

Hull treated these agreements less as commercial administration than as a means of preventing war. He spoke of the approaching "Niagara of war" and traced it to a global trade war, singling out the imperial preference tariffs established by the Ottawa Agreements of 1932 as the principal source of economic and political instability. In January 1936 he told the British ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay that the imperial preference system had caused the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and predicted that Germany would invade its neighbours if the trade war continued. He read fascism as a revolt against limits on national prosperity and argued that ending protectionism would remove the incentive for German and Italian expansion. The limits of that reading were visible at the time: he accepted at face value Hitler's and Mussolini's claims about "have not" nations, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. accused him of being myopic about fascism through his long obsession with trade agreements.

The record was substantial. Between 1934 and 1945 the United States signed 32 reciprocal trade agreements with 27 countries, the negotiating authority was renewed in 1937, 1940, 1943 and 1945, and it provided the authority under which the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was concluded. Average American duties on foreign products fell from 46 percent in 1934 to 12 percent by 1962. The early agreements nonetheless concentrated on Latin American countries, and the authority lapsed and was renewed repeatedly, failing of renewal in 1948 and passing through a series of short extensions in the 1950s. After the power to cut tariffs expired in 1961, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and the Kennedy Round followed. Hull's reciprocal-trade system is widely credited with opening the era of liberal trade policy that persisted through the twentieth century, though its wartime premise that trade concessions could buy peace from Nazi Germany went untested.