Smoot-Hawley was like giving poor old George Washington leeches when he was suffering his final illness. It was an added insult to what was already a disaster.
Smoot-Hawley wasn’t much different than Fordney-McCumber, the tariff act of 1922. If S-H caused the Depression you would think that Fordney-McCumber would have been similarly followed by a disaster rather than the boom of the 1920s.
Friedman and Schwartz blame the Depression on the collapse of the money supply. As did Joseph Schumpeter, a contemporary of the Depression. It was a major monetary event, the destruction of the credit portion of the money supply due to massive bank failures. We can still see how Wall Street reacts to just the suggestion that the Fed will tighten credit. Imagine a 30% real reduction in the money supply.
Smoot-Hawley was a fiscal event, not a monetary one. From what I can see monetary effects are more powerful than the fiscal.
Yes, money supply #1, tariff increase #2, and the thing that perpetuated the depression as DeCanio shows was the minimum wage law first introduced in 34 as a part of NRA. Job growth, as measured by work hours crashed even worse than 32-33.