from Hoover and Coolidge.
I think your quote is a fair assessment of his thoughts on tariffs in 1933. After campaigning against high tariffs in 1932 he introduced the RTAA in 1934 which he used to lower tariffs. The quote may have been an expression of his opinion of how limited they should be - compared to the high tariff levels republicans had enacted - since, in the next, year he started to lower them.
And one could argue that his view of tariffs and trade in general evolved over the course of time. As WWII progressed and he envisioned the post-war world, he seemed committed to multilateral organizations that would play a large role in international affairs. The United Nations was the first, proposed in 1942. Then in 1944 his Bretton Woods conference came up with the IMF, the World Bank and the International Trade Organization ("an international institution for the regulation of trade").
I think his later commitment to multilateral governance of international issues was partly a fear that conservatives would regain power in the US and elsewhere and bring about a return to the same high tariffs and isolationism that Coolidge and Hoover had promoted.
From the Roosevelt Institute: The Next New Deal
The driving force behind this effort was FDR's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who considered the passage of Smoot-Hawley an unmitigated disaster. Hull had been arguing in favor of freer trade for decades, both as a Democratic congressman and later senator from Tennessee. Given the long-standing protectionist tendencies of Congress -- which reached their zenith with the passage of Smoot-Hawley, the highest tariff in U.S. history -- Hull faced an uphill struggle to accomplish this task.
He also had to overcome FDR's initial reluctance to embrace his ideas, as the president preferred the policies of the "economic nationalists" within his administration during his first year in office. By 1934, however, FDR's attitude began to change, and in March of that year the president threw his support behind Hull's proposed Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act -- a landmark piece of legislation that fundamentally altered the way in which the United States carried out foreign economic policy.
Convinced that the country was not ready for a truly multilateral approach to freer trade, Hull's legislation sought to establish a system of bilateral agreements through which the United States would seek reciprocal reductions in the duties imposed on specific commodities with other interested governments. These reductions would then be generalized by the application of the most-favored-nation principle, with the result that the reduction accorded to a commodity from one country would then be accorded to the same commodity when imported from other countries. Well aware of the lingering resistance to tariff reduction that remained in Congress, Hull insisted that
the power to make these agreements must rest with the president alone, without the necessity of submitting them to the Senate for approval. Under the act, the president would be granted the power to decrease or increase existing rates by as much as 50 percent in return for reciprocal trade concessions granted by the other country.
It is also important to note that Hull, like many of his contemporaries, including
FDR, regarded protectionism as antithetical to the average worker -- first, because in FDR's view high tariffs shifted the burden of financing the government from the rich to the poor, and secondly, because he believed that high tariffs concentrated wealth in the hands of the industrial elite, who, as a consequence, wielded an undue or even corrupting influence in Washington. As such, both FDR and Hull saw the opening up of the world's economy as a positive measure that would help alleviate global poverty, improve the lives of workers, reduce tensions among nations, and help usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. Indeed, by the time the U.S. entered the war, this conviction had intensified to the point where the two men concluded that the root cause of the war was economic depravity.
The U.S. would also champion the 1944 Bretton Woods Accords, which set up the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and after the war,
the RTAA would go on to serve as the model for the negotiation of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), the critical institution upon which the modern global economy stands and the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO) established in 1995. Hence, it was U.S. reciprocal trade policy -- a policy that had changed little since its inception during the New Deal -- combined with a newfound determination to play a leading role in world affairs, that
guided U.S. policymakers in the mid-1940s towards a new post-war international economic order -- an economic order still largely in operation to this day.
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/fdrs-comprehensive-approach-freer-trade
This is the first time I read that the RTAA actually gave FDR the power to unilaterally raise or lower tariffs up to 50% without congressional approval.
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