That’s what one of the things that triggered the Depression in the US back then.
Pelham says:
At eh.net you can find write-ups on the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, the rates of which were very close to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.
The F-M Tariff was followed by the Roaring 20s, something that the S-H Tariff boogieman crowd cant explain. Maybe the words Smoot-Hawley contain some magic that Fordney-McCumber lacks because otherwise the two tariffs werent much different.
Anyway economic data shows that the Great Depression began around August of 1929 and Smoot-Hawley wasnt signed into law until nearly a full year later. The tariff didnt help things but it wasnt the cause of the Depression, the cause generally believed to be the massive cascading failure in the American banking system. Friedman and Schwartz devote a long chapter to this in their A Monetary History of the United States, and Schumpeter wrote about the role of American bank failures and the Depression as well.