“As a congressman, he wrote what came to be known as the “McKinley tariff” of 1890, and as president he signed another increase in 1897.
But a funny thing happened after the U.S. came out of the Panic (and subsequent four-year depression) of 1893: Goosed by sharp increases in domestic iron and copper production, Americans had too many goods chasing too few consumers. And McKinley himself began agitating to tear down some of those trade barriers.
“What we produce beyond our domestic consumption must have a vent abroad,” he said in September 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. “The excess must be relieved through a foreign outlet, and we should sell everywhere we can, and buy wherever the buying will enlarge our sales and productions, and thereby make a greater demand for home labor. The period of exclusiveness is past,” he continued. “The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable….If perchance some of our tariffs are no longer needed, for revenue or to encourage and protect our industries at home, why should they not be employed to extend and promote our markets abroad?”
McKinley’s presidency was ended by an assassin’s bullet the very next day.
Even before his late-life pivot to freer trade, McKinley had long been a champion of reciprocity, i.e., the bilateral, mutually beneficial reduction of targeted, asymmetrical tariffs. Or, as he put it in his first inaugural address, “the opening up of new markets for the products of our country, by granting concessions to the products of other lands that we need and cannot produce ourselves, and which do not involve any loss of labor to our own people, but tend to increase their employment.”
In his second term, Trump has demonstrated less enthusiasm for reciprocity than he has for the other two Rs of traditional protectionism, revenue and restriction. Asked last October by Joe Rogan whether he was serious about replacing the federal income tax with tariffs, Trump said, “Yeah, sure. Why not?”—and then engaged in some historical revisionism.”
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“the tariff system and perennial adjustments thereof was a cornucopia of corruption, putting the gilded in Gilded Age. Far from being a sophisticated manipulation of import/export duties to nurture nascent industries, the tariff schedule was a Christmas tree decorated by special interests.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/06/trump-is-wrong-about-mckinleys-tariff-legacy