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.”
Cezar’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.”)
The law re-entered public consciousness with the 1986 release of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” featuring actor Ben Stein as a dry high school teacher who tells his students the act was a failure.
Cezar, whose great-grandfather died in 1941, said the law was part of her early education, too. “The Smoot-Hawley Act is part of my family’s history, and I learned about it as a kid,” she said.
She recalled that her mother was “deeply embarrassed” by the last name Hawley when she was growing up in Baltimore in the wake of the Great Depression. She was ashamed of being linked with a law that had intensified economic devastation, Cezar said.
“She was happy to get a new name when she got married,” Cezar added.
Cezar has kept some family mementos from that dark historical chapter, including ration tickets for food and basic goods such as shoes.
In recent weeks, as Wall Street reeled from uncertainty over Trump’s tariff plans, Cezar watched her financial holdings tumble. She said her 401(k) retirement account lost around 10% of its value. She said she does not believe the nation is entering a new “golden age,” as Trump proclaimed Wednesday.
Trump’s tariffs regime has been presented as an effort to boost domestic manufacturing by forcing importers to pay steeper levies on goods produced in other countries. It’s an initiative likely to drive up prices for consumers.
Trump, who has long argued that the United States gets “ripped off” by other countries, said Wednesday that the nation has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered.” He vowed that American industry would be “reborn.”
U.S. stock markets reversed post-election gains as Trump delivered his remarks. In after-hours trading, S&P 500 futures dropped 1.5%.
Days after the presidential election, amid speculation about Trump’s economic agenda, Cezar posted a comment on Facebook that implored other users to “learn about what tariffs do to the economy.”
“I asked people to just take a minute and study their history,” she said.
Nobody replied.
