US Presidency
1932

I have the privilege of informing him that 66 percent of all the duties collected on all of the imports into the United States are directly on imports of agricultural origin and the reduction of which would affect American farmers. Are we to take it that all the diatribes we have heard from the Democratic orators throughout this campaign are in respect to only one-third of the American tariffs? For just 7 days ago the Democratic candidate said, The Hawley-Smoot tariff law carried the decline in world trade, and what amounted to a world calamity became a general international calamity. Since that time he must have concluded that the farm tariffs have done the world no harm. You will further remember that under the tariff act two-thirds of our imports are free of duty, and now he excludes two-thirds of the remaining one-third that are dutiable. Does the Democratic Party now pretend that this terrible world calamity which we have encountered was caused by the tariffs on one-ninth of the imports into the United States?