Book Review

Canada and the United States

This is an interesting book doing what political history is supposed to do—use historical material to clarify current issues. Dana Frank gives insights, casting a refreshing, irreverent eye on global competition and economic nationalism.	1
Frank begins before the American Revolution, with a major argument: "Buy American" campaigns never do much for workers. The first order of business, for example, at the First Continental Congress in 1774 was the boycott of British products. Frank argues convincingly that nonimportation was loaded with hypocrisy. Symbolically, elites refused to wear European finery, only adorning themselves in local homespun. Throughout the North, they set up factories, hiring poor women to make clothes. Conditions were so abysmal and wages so low, however, that the "impoverished women fled . . . as fast as they could, quickly figuring out that the patriots paid wages below the starvation level" (p. 12). Colonial merchants also created shortages and higher prices for their own domestically produced goods by supporting nonimportation. These merchants were often attacked by lower-class protesters, not because of importing but because they were price gouging. However, the biggest promoters of nonimportation, those who gained the most financially, were not above clandestinely importing European and British products. Thomas Jefferson ordered a long list of British goods to furnish his new house in 1771 (p. 19). John Hancock, prominent colonial shipping magnate, was exposed, with vessels loaded with British freight, even as he trumpeted homemade goods. Frank contrasts the stances of the rich with sailors who had little interest in nonimportation. Rather, they opposed ruthless shipowners and captains of whatever nationality, standing in solidarity with sailors around the world.	2
Likewise, heated tariff battles in the late nineteenth century obscured basic agreement between supporters and opponents on raging class issues. Both sides opposed labor unions (p. 45). The Knights of Labor was cognizant of this deficiency, as its correspondent Ralph Beaumont reported that the "tariff issue had about as much to do with settling of the burdens of . . . the working people . . . as my yellow dog—and I did not have a yellow dog" (p. 50). Although protectionist agitation, then as today, proclaimed the benefits for ordinary workers, the truth was different. Just after Andrew Carnegie received tariff protection for his steel in 1892, the company announced a twenty-two percent pay reduction at its Homestead plant in Pennsylvania. When the workers refused, their union was broken by armed violence. The unions themselves, however, were not detached from the worst aspects of economic nationalism; one criticism of Carnegie was his importation of foreign labor, described by labor organizations in chauvinistic terms.	3
These historical descriptions put contemporary issues in sharp relief. Frank describes the extent to which unions devote significant resources to Buy American campaigns, allying themselves with antiunion outfits (p. 219). The big question, of course, is why? Her main argument is that chauvinistic Buy American campaigns, supporting the agendas of employers, are a substitute for devoting energy and resources to new union organizing, and in general to battling the companies for the rights of union members.	. . .