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From TheNation
http://www.thenation.com/issue/991025/1025cavanagh.shtml
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October 25, 1999
Is the Boston Tea Party Over?
by JOHN CAVANAGH
BUY AMERICAN:
The Untold Story of
Economic Nationalism.
By Dana Frank.
Beacon. 352 pp. $26.
Purchase this book online
from Amazon.com
Anyone who has led a discussion on the economy or trade or globalization in
this country has faced the question, Should I buy American? Sounds simple
enough. But this turns out to be a tough question to answer, even if you are
squarely set on helping US workers live in dignity. First, from toys to
televisions, many products are no longer even assembled here. Furthermore, a
lot of the goods made here are produced under abysmal working conditions. Some
imported goods are made by workers whose rights are respected. You might ask
the audience: Is a car made in Ohio by a Japanese company better than a bicycle
made in Taiwan by a US company?
Yet buying American, as University of California historian Dana Frank's
illuminating history reveals, has been a rallying cry for millions in this
country ever since Paul Revere and his cohorts, faces blackened, boarded the
ships of the East India Company monopoly and clogged Boston Harbor with
90,000 pounds of imported tea. Frank shows how, in the decades and
centuries that followed the famous tea party, the movement has always had
a fascinating cross-class composition: Wealthy entrepreneurs joined with
workers to wrap themselves in the American flag of consumption. One result
of this multiclass alliance from 1773 to the present, as Frank points out,
is that "as often as not, their visions of the just economy" are "in conflict
with each other."
This book is a monumental effort of archival work and extensive interviews that
is as insightful on race as it is on class. Frank's early history is
particularly fascinating and fun. Few who read American history books kn ow
that "a Buy American campaign gave birth to the United States of America": As
early as 1764, groups began pledging to give up imported clothes, cheese,
jewelry, furniture, mustard and candy, not to mention tea (local herb tea sales
jumped).
Students at Yale swore off foreign liquor. Indeed, by the early 1770s, all
colonies save New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die" has deep roots) had passed
resolutions to cease purchases of imported clothing. Patriotic rituals like
well-attended public spinning bees were the rage across the colonies. Sales of
all sorts of foreign goods plummeted. The struggle for economic independence
laid the groundwork for the war for political independence.
Yet as Frank reveals, the very US entrepreneurs who led the boycotts went
on to set up the first large-scale factories, paying starvation wages, to
replace imported clothing. The other population forced to produce the domestic
clothing was literally in slavery, including slaves owned by George Washington.
Frank's most important contribution is to expose, at each historic stage of the
Buy American movement, who gained and who lost, and what economic interests
might have motivated participants. Thomas Paine and Paul Revere, great patriots
for sure, were skilled craftsmen who could hardly compete with mass-produced
goods emerging from the Industrial Revolution in England. Nonimportation has
always produced profits for merchants turned hoarders, price gougers or
smugglers. And, indeed, boycott leaders George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and
John Hancock on occasion quietly imported boycotted goods. The Constitution,
which abolished interstate tariffs and creat ed a giant free-trade zone out of
the United States, helped these merchant interests and served as a launching
pad for imperial expansion to the south and west.
For all the populist rhetoric that surrounds protectionism, Frank makes a
strong case that its most ardent supporters in American history have been
domestic entrepreneurs who often have been among the worst exploiters of
workers. On the other hand, she shows that a part of the free-trade movement
has consisted of progressive trustbusters who opposed protection for large-
scale domestic monopolies. Her point is to show that there have alway s been
big business interests on both sides of the debate; a corporation's position
depends on whether it needs protected markets, cheap imports or access to
export markets. In 1892 steel magnate Andrew Carnegie demonstrated vividly how
protectionism doesn't necessarily translate into benefits for workers. That
year, he lowered wages at his big Pennsylvania steel plant in the wake of the
raising of steel tariffs. When workers balked, Carnegie's manager shut down the
plant and hired 300 Pinkerton detectives to bust up the workers' union.
The twentieth-century heyday of the Buy American movement was the early years
of the Great Depression. With William Randolph Hearst Jr. blaring Buy American
stories across the front pages of his twenty-seven newspapers, the movement
took off, culminating in
