Choosing Sides: The Creation of an Agricultural Policy Network in Congress, 1919–1932

In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the last of the major tariff bills that redistributed millions of dollars from consumers to domestic manufacturers. The Smoot-Hawley bill, E. E. Schattschneider observed, arose not from a process that was open and attentive to all but from “a free private enterprise in pressure politics which administered itself”, a process accessible only to protected industrialists and their congressional and bureaucratic allies. The outlines of public policy, he concluded, mirrored the membership of this “private enterprise”: “The nature of public policy is the result of ‘effective demands’ upon the government”.