Signed into law in June 1930 during the Hoover presidency, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, coauthored by Oregon congressman Willis Hawley and Utah senator Reed Smoot, increased U. S. tariffs on imports to the highest levels in history. Often described as an “infamous” piece of legislation, the Hawley-Smoot Act has been blamed for prompting a worldwide increase in tariffs and for helping turn a moderate recession into the full-blown Great Depression. Although historians and economists have disagreed about the extent to which it contributed to the Great Depression, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff nonetheless had important political and economic consequences during the early 1930s.
Traditionally the Republican Party had advocated a policy of high tariffs in an effort to protect American industry and workers from an influx of inexpensive foreign goods. In 1922, a Republican Congress passed the Ford-ney-McCumber Tariff, which established high protectionist rates, and throughout the 1920s the GOP championed protective tariffs. During the election of 1928, the Republican platform called for a reexamination of Fordney-McCumber, and an upward revision of the tariff. As the tariff became a primary subject of debate in Congress in 1930, a number of special interests worked to secure high duties on foreign goods.
President Herbert C. Hoover, who favored high duties on agricultural imports in order to protect farmers, but increases on industrial products only when made necessary by increased unemployment, argued against a general increase in the tariff. He also felt that lobbyists had an excessive amount of influence in tariff legislation. He desired a more flexible tariff to be controlled by a tariff commission operating under the authority of the president, which could raise or lower tariffs by up to 50 percent. Although Congress acquiesced in Hoover’s demand for greater flexibility through a strengthened tariff commission, it nonetheless passed a bill with high tariff levels for both industrial and agricultural goods, after 44 days and five nights of testimony and debate. Despite the protests of nearly a thousand economists who warned against continued restriction of trade through such high tariffs, and against his better judgment, President Hoover signed the Hawley-Smoot Act into law.
Politically, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff weakened the president. Ultimately losing the struggle with Congress, Hoover had demonstrated that he did not have the political skill to maintain control over his party. While the precise economic effects of the tariff remain difficult to gauge, its adoption in 1930 was interpreted by other nations as America’s turn toward even more stringent protectionist policies. As a result, many other nations also increased tariff levels. Between 1930 and 1932, the retaliation of at least 25 trading partners would play a part in the decline of U. S. exports that would continue until the New Deal and the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934.
Further reading: Alfred E. Eckes, “Revisiting Hawley-Smoot,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 295-310; Douglas Irwin, “The Hawley-Smoot Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment,” Review of Economics and Statistics 80 (May 1998): 326-335.
—Shannon L. Parsley
Henderson, Leon (1895-1986) economist, government administrator
Leon Henderson, one of the New Deal’s most influential administrators, served in a number of significant posts under President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1934 and 1942.
Born in Millville, New Jersey, on May 26, 1895, Leon Henderson graduated from Swarthmore College, and after postgraduate work taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After serving two years as deputy secretary of Pennsylvania, he became director of consumer credit research for the Russell Sage Foundation in 1925.
Henderson joined the Roosevelt administration in 1934, when he became consumer affairs adviser and then director of the Research and Planning Division of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). A persistent consumer advocate, Henderson criticized the NRA’s industry-written codes, claiming they increased business concentration and prevented recovery by permitting production restrictions and price increases. Originally an advocate of national industrial planning, Henderson became one of the New Deal’s foremost advocates of antimonopoly policy.
After the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, Henderson became economic adviser to the Democratic Party National Committee, and consultant to Harry L. Hopkins at the Works Progress Administration. Influenced by Hopkins and Marriner Eccles, Henderson by 1938 had become a convert to Keynesianism, the idea that government deficit spending could stimulate the economy.
The recession of 1937-1938 led the Roosevelt administration to turn both to additional spending and to increased emphasis on antimonopoly policy. At Roosevelt’s request, Congress established the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) in 1938, and Henderson became TNEC’s executive director, urging investigations of all forms of economic concentration and continuing his opposition to monopoly. Roosevelt appointed Henderson to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1939, further antagonizing opponents in business and industry.
In 1941, Roosevelt selected Henderson to head the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which administered rationing during World War II and set maximum prices on nonfarm consumer goods. The OPA became one of the most unpopular wartime agencies, and Henderson, always outspoken and often abrasive, became a lightning rod for public discontent and a target for unhappy interest groups. Democratic Party officials were also upset with Henderson’s refusal to use OPA for political patronage appointments. Henderson resigned as OPA director after
Democratic setbacks in the 1942 elections, citing illness and overwork.
After the war, Henderson worked as an economist in both the public and private sectors, and served as chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal, anticommunist advocacy group. Henderson retired in the middle 1960s, settled on the West Coast, and died in Oceanside, California, on October 19, 1986.
Further reading: Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966).
—William J. Thompson
Hersey, John R. (1914-1993) journalist, novelist John Richard Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, on June 17, 1914, a son of missionaries. He attended private academies in the United States and was accepted to Yale University in 1932, majoring in literature. Hersey graduated in 1936 and subsequently attended Cambridge University but did not take a degree. The following year he briefly served as secretary to novelist Sinclair Lewis before joining Henry Luce’s Time magazine as a reporter. In this capacity he covered several leading figures in the Far East and, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, he unsuccessfully sought a commission in the U. S. Navy. Hersey then served during World War II as a war correspondent for publications such as Time and Life magazine. In 1943 his coverage of the Guadalcanal campaign in the World War II Pacific theater was published as Into the Valley, to rave reviews. Hersey also reported on military affairs in North Africa and Italy, and his first novel, A Bell for Adano, emerged in 1944. The following year it received the Pulitzer Prize, and it was made into a Hollywood movie. He next completed several journalistic tours in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before and after the fighting concluded. However, Hersey’s most celebrated publication came in 1946 following his visit to the ruins of Hiroshima. The resulting book, simply entitled Hiroshima, is regarded as a seminal work of wartime reporting. In it his simple yet evocative renderings of six atomic bomb victims, rendered in a compelling journalistic fashion, proved an immediate best seller and ultimately sold 3 million copies. Hersey then experienced a bitter fallout with Luce in 1946 and transferred as a freelance writer to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly magazines, where he published several revealing essays along with a dozen novels over the next three decades. Of this body of work only one piece, The Wall (1950), concerning the Jewish Holocaust, proved a commercial success. In 1953 he also became, at 39, the youngest writer ever elected to the prestigious National Academy of Arts. Hersey, a lifelong Democrat, also campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 before joining the staff of Yale University as a professor of literature. His final collection of essays emerged in 1993 as Key West Tales, shortly before he died in Key West, Florida, on March 24, 1993.
See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Further reading: David Sanders, John Hersey Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991).
—John C. Fredriksen
Hershey, Lewis B. (1893-1977) director, U. S. Selective Service system
Lewis Blaine Hershey was born in Steuben County, Indiana, on September 12, 1893, a son of farmers. Despite his Mennonite background, he joined the Indiana National Guard in 1911 and performed patrols along the Mexican border under General John J. Pershing. He subsequently saw service with the artillery in Europe during World War I and was afterwards commissioned in the regular army. Hershey attended the Command and General Staff College in 1931 and the Army War College in 1933, and three years later he reported for duty with the General Staff of the War Department in Washington, D. C. It was here that Hershey made indelible contributions to the military establishment as part of the Joint Army and Navy Selective Service Committee by drawing up extensive plans for the first-ever peacetime draft that went into effect in October 1940. Following the American entry into World War II Hershey was tapped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve as assistant director, then director, of the new Selective Service System. In this capacity, Hershey orchestrated a massive, nationwide system of conscription, based on 6,400 local draft boards, that efficiently brought in some 10 million recruits out of a combined pool of 40 million eligible men. So effectively did Hershey administer the draft that in 1942 he advanced to major general, and in March 1947, after the draft ended, he was retained as director of the Office of Selective Service Records.
The onset of the cold war in 1948 led to a resumption of draft activities, and Hershey was reappointed head of the Selective Service by President Harry S. Truman. Throughout the Korean War he managed his affairs adroitly, procuring 550,000 men for the army, and he also retained his position under the administrations of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. However, growing American involvement in Southeast Asia resulted in an expansion of draft activities in 1965 and a commensurate growth of antiwar activities. Hershey, disdainful of war protestors, threatened to remove their draft deferments as college students, but he was dissuaded by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson’s successor, Richard M. Nixon, viewed
Hershey as a political liability, so in February 1970 he was promoted to full general and reassigned as a presidential adviser on manpower matters. Hershey resigned from active duty in April 1973, and he died in Angola, Indiana, on May 20, 1977. His 30-year tenure as head of the Selective Service Agency marks him as a successful military bureaucrat.
Further reading: George Q, Flynn, Lewis B. Hershey, Mr. Selective Service (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
—John C. Fredriksen
Higgins, Andrew J. (1886-1952) innovative shipbuilder of World War II
Andrew Jackson Higgins was born in Columbus, Nebraska, on August 28, 1886, the son of a judge. He worked as a logger and truck driver before settling in Mobile, Alabama, to manage his own lumber company. He then relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana, to operate another lumbering firm, but after 1923, he began dabbling in shipbuilding. An innovative designer and builder, Higgins enjoyed considerable success, and in 1931 he founded Higgins Industries to expand his line of products to motorboats, tugs, barges, and racing craft. Ironically, his most notable product was Eureka, a simple square-ended barge with a ramp at the bow that had been designed for use in extremely shallow water. This invention was relatively fast, maneuverable, and could carry prodigious amounts of cargo for its size. In 1938 Higgins was approached by the U. S. Navy and U. S. Marines, which sought military applications for the vessel, and in 1940 it entered the service as a landing craft, or “Higgins Boat.” Throughout World War II thousands of these vessels were constructed by Higgins, and they gave the United States an unmatched capacity for waging amphibious warfare. For example, no fewer than 1,500 such craft were utilized in Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, and large numbers were also employed throughout the World War II Pacific theater. By war’s end Higgins employed 20,000 workers and had constructed no less than 20,000 vessels of varying sizes, including those capable of hauling several tanks ashore, and company profits rose to $94 million. Higgins was also unique among contemporaries in embracing the notion of collective bargaining for labor, an unusual stance in the South, which gained him favorable attention from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the election of 1944 Higgins reciprocated by heading “Businessmen for Roosevelt.” In 1945 he abolished his old firm and created Higgins, Incorporated, which specialized in building commercial craft, pleasure craft, and housing materials. Though innovative as ever, Higgins proved less successful in the postwar period, and his company eventually folded.
Higgins died in New Orleans on August 1, 1952, hailed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and others as “the man who won the war for us.”
Further reading: Jerry E. Strahan, Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boat That Won World War II (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).
—John C. Fredriksen
Hillman, Sidney (1887-1946) labor leader Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) for more than 30 years and a cofounder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was a politically influential labor leader of the 1930s and 1940s.
Born in Zagare, Lithuania, then part of Russia, on March 23, 1887, “Simcha” Hillman was sent by his parents to study for the rabbinate, but instead turned to socialist politics and labor agitation, which led to his arrest and imprisonment for protesting in favor of a 10-hour working day. Fleeing Russia in 1906, Hillman lived in England with an uncle before moving to the United States and settling in Chicago. In Chicago, Hillman went to work as a cloth cutter, and led a successful 1910 strike of women garment workers.
Over the next several years, Hillman became a prominent union organizer among garment workers in Chicago and New York, and in 1914 became the first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. During World War I, he served in Washington, D. C., on the Board of Control and Labor Standards for Army Clothing. Hillman organized clothing workers in the 1920s, maneuvering his way around Communists and labor gangsters, and became a leader of the “new unionism”—the effort to improve every aspect of workers’ lives, not merely to seek higher wages.
The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932 changed the position of organized labor in America and brought union leaders such as Hillman into greater public prominence and political influence. Hillman welcomed the New Deal, and he served on the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and on other New Deal agencies. Hillman’s association with labor leader John L. Lewis led to the ACW being admitted to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and he joined with David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to organize clothing workers.
Hillman, along with Lewis and others, grew increasingly frustrated with the AFL’s neglect of workers in the mass production industries such as automobiles, coal, steel, and, of course, clothing. Beginning in 1934, Hillman, Lewis, and the other dissident leaders called on the AFL to organize mass production workers into industrial unions. Along with Lewis, Dubinsky, and seven other union leaders, Hillman cofounded the Committee for Industrial Organization in 1935 as a branch within the AFL. When the AFL suspended the dissident unionists in 1937, Hillman and the others formally separated in 1938, changing the group’s name to Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
In 1936, Hillman, who had previously been an active Socialist for many years, endorsed Roosevelt, and as treasurer of Labor’s Non-Partisan League, raised more than $1 million for the president’s reelection. In the latter 1930s, Hillman organized the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, attempting unsuccessfully to break into the nonunion South and in the process earning the enmity of southern politicians such as James F. Byrnes (whom Hillman may have prevented from being FDR’s running mate in 1940 and 1944). In contrast to Lewis, who broke with Roosevelt after 1936, Hillman moved closer politically to the president, supporting, for example, the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In 1940, with World War II having begun in Europe, Roosevelt named Hillman as associate director general (with General Motors chairman William Knudsen) of the Oeeice of Production Management, and as labor member of the National Defense Advisory Commission. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt named Hillman as labor member of the War Production Board, and unlike Lewis, he and the ACW abided by the president’s “nostrike pledge” request. In 1943, Hillman became chairman and director of the CIO-Political Action Committee, which would help pro-labor Democratic Party candidates.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1944, Hillman played a visible but mysterious role in the nomination of Harry S. Truman for vice president, as Roosevelt instructed aides to “clear it (Truman’s nomination) with Sidney.” In the fall campaign, the Republican Party used “Clear It with Sidney” to portray Roosevelt as a tool of Hillman and the CIO-PAC as a haven for Communists, and some Republicans engaged in Red-baiting and ANTISemitism to smear the union leader. The tactics backfired as Hillman and labor played a significant role in Roosevelt’s victory in the election oe 1944.
After Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Hillman remained influential with Truman and the Democrats, while locked in a struggle with Communist elements in the CIO. In ill health since 1942, Hillman suffered a series of heart attacks, and died on July 10, 1946, at his Point Lookout, New York, summer cottage.
Further reading: Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991).
—William J. Thompson
World History
