Pros And Cons Of The Truman Free Trade

A good example of how the Democratic Party’s industrial/agricultural ties can blow their free trade agenda off course comes from the trade policy of Harry Truman. Truman’s key achievement in this area is undoubtedly the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1949. Recall that the GATT was negotiated directly after the Second World War, which is supposedly a period in which liberal trade politics were considered integral to a new peaceful and prosperous world order. Additionally, Truman himself bought into this logic, as argued by Trezise “Truman was pretty clearly a dedicated free trader” (Trezise, 1993, p189). Commentators on this agreement have tended to focus far too much on the International dynamics of this agreement, which has purported GATT was a wholly ‘free trade’ agreement. For example in Dobson’s analysis of the GATT he argued that “its philosophy rested firmly on the theories of comparative and absolute advantage” he goes on to say that the GATT emerged through a …show more content…
Arguably the most influential piece of trade legislation under the Kennedy government was the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 which granted the Whitehouse unprecedented authority in foreign trade: allowing the Whitehouse to negotiate tariff reductions of up to 50% (Metzger, 1963, p425).
This new granting of authority to the Whitehouse did have important implications for US trade relations as it essentially allowed for the US to negotiate the Kennedy Round tariff cuts without having to inform Congress. The Johnson administration were subsequently able to pursue their free trade ambitions under the auspices of the GATT. With this authority, the Johnson administration was able to secure a policy of “across the board tariff cutting for GATT nations” (Finger, 1976, p94), with the average tariff reduction in the US between 1967 and 1972 being 46.8%, strikingly close to the set aim of 50% (Marvel and Ray, 1983,