What was the initial motivation for the townshend acts?

The main characteristic of Harding's government was the support it lent to commercial and financial companies. Secretary of the Treasury Mellon carried out a program of public spending and tax cuts and reduced the surcharge of the highest taxes. The interests of the big companies were satisfied by the return to the traditional republican protectionist policy that Harding printed with the approval of the Emergency Tariff Act of the year 1921, and the Fordney-MacCumber Act of 1922, which raised tariffs to unprecedented levels until then.

Consistent with his belief in the need to carry out an interventionist economic policy on the part of the Government as lax as possible, Harding abandoned Wilson's federal financial policy, which is why the Federal Trade Commission and similar organizations ceased to function in the practice. Something similar happened with the antitrust legislation undertaken by the previous progressive governments, which made visible a progressive consolidation of the companies, especially those dedicated to the banking sector, the public services, the automobile industry and the retail sale.

Harding also supported employers in industrial disputes. In the strike of miners of the state of West Virginia in 1921, Harding did not hesitate to send federal troops to restore order. After the most violent outbreak in the coalfields of Illinois, in 1922, the president got the miners back to work through the promise (which he failed) to establish a federal commission of inquiry. Almost at the same time, the state attorney general ended a railroad strike by obtaining a general injunction against the strikers, while the Supreme Court, chaired by Taft, gave the US trade unionists a series of successive blows that They made him stagger and be subject to government control.