Popular Media (ICLE)
Tariffs Didn’t Drive America’s Nineteenth-Century Growth. They Won’t Today, Either
City Journal
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President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs–and his promised trade agenda—draw partly from a narrative popular among protectionists. In this telling, high tariffs fueled America’s nineteenth-century industrial rise. Tariff-supporters like Oren Cass have argued that the United States “transformed from colonial backwater to continent-spanning industrial colossus” behind protective barriers.
Economic research suggests otherwise. While the United States did maintain exceptionally high tariffs from the Civil War through World War I (often 40 percent to 50 percent on manufactured imports), these were at best incidental to industrial growth—and likely harmful to it.