Ah, Hoover enacted Smoot-Hawley. Look it up on google. Back in the day the GOP was protectionist and the Democrats were free traders...don’t you read history...now do you form your opinions if you don’t inform yourself?
Yes, I know who enacted Smoot-Hawley. To say that Smoot was causative is oversimplistic, but that’s for another thread. The fact of the matter is that, labels aside, Roosevelt was a control freak who thought that competition and profit were evil. He dumped US commodities on foreign shores which resulted in tarrifs being levied against those products by those countries. Meanwhile, he was buring crops in the field to hold prices down which resulted higher prices. Why? Because his policies created shortages and made the United States - the breadbasket of the world - a net importer of foodstuffs.
So Democrats of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s may have marketed themselves as “free traders”, but what they really were was in love with the socialism that was taking root in Europe. He thought Uncle Joe Stalin was a prince and that Communist Russia was heaven on earth.