Ignoring the past

The future’s a mystery. But it’s also true history repeats itself. So when we come to a fork in the road the past – by shedding light on old mistakes – can help us choose the road to take.

At the end of ‘The Roaring Twenties’ my grandmother married – as a young girl she’d watched electricity transform her hometown. Mills and factories boomed. Cars and trucks replaced horses and mules – farming boomed. In 1929 after she married The Great Depression struck. They had two cars sitting in the driveway, couldn’t afford to put gas in either one.

With The Great Depression deepening, our Republican president, who had Republican majorities in the House and Senate, passed the Smoot-Hawley Act. Tariffs, they said, were the cure.

The friends we hit with tariffs – like Canada and Mexico – hit us back with tariffs of their own. Exports dropped. Imports dropped. The economy plummeted. Unemployment rose from 8% to 16% to 25%.

Republicans lost the Senate, the House, and Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide in 1932. But the broken economy took years to heal.

After that, we steered clear of tariff wars. But Trump’s now taking us down an old road – certain he’s right sees tariffs as the road to a new ‘Golden Age.’

Of course, there’s no way to know whether that’s right or wrong. The future is a mystery. But, still, it’s risky to ignore the past. Even if you’re a president. We’ll see what happens.

*******

Telling stories, in his memoir Carter Wrenn follows The Trail of the Serpent twisting and turning through politics from Reagan to Trump. Order his book from Amazon.