Election of 1928

Intro | United States Tariff History | Setting the Stage | The Harding Years | Election of 1928 | Hearings & Proceedings | Aftermath | Lessons | References | Bibliography

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The plight of farmers continued. In 1924, Senator Charles L. McNary of Oregon and Representative Gilbert N. Haugen of Iowa presented a new bill, the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill. The bill had two main parts.

• A Farm Board would be created, and the government would buy any surplus crops

• The Farm Board could choose to sell surplus crops abroad, in order to raise domestic agricultural prices (13)

The Bill was repeatedly vetoed in 1924 and '27 by President Calvin Coolidge. Some claim that it could not pass due to the lack of support from non-farm sectors.

In 1928, President Coolidge announced that he was not going to run for re-election. In the 1928 election, the plight of the agricultural sector took precedence. One of the major issues in the election discussed possible ways to provide relief for the farm sector, and included some of the elements of the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill. Another centered around the general revision of the tariff schedules established in the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Act (14,15).

Republican Candidate Herbert Hoover proposed an adequate tariff as the foundation of farm relief, along with the establishment of a Farm Board which would help stabilize the agricultural market (16).

Democratic Candidate Alfred Smith