The circle of the undead
From my childhood I recall my father once recalling from his childhood the singular subject and texture of "conversation" between his two most elderly relatives — one a Republican, the other a Democrat — whenever they met at a family event. Invariably the two wizened gentlemen talked of tariffs, and, as my father remembered these occasional get-togethers, invariably their talks were but deafening denunciations of each other's stupidity.
The heated skirmishes of my decrepit, long-ago hyper-opinionated paternal relations were those of an even earlier time, the 19th century, when so much of politics was the setting of tariffs, the vast motherlode of the federal government's pre-Sixteenth Amendment revenue. The mere mention of such could be fightin' words — Q.E.D., Carpenter family functions in border-state Missouri, hence the greater likelihood of in-person partisan conflict, pro-tariff Republican vs. anti-tariff Democrat.
The national schism was logical. From the industrial North and the agricultural South flowed protectionist Republicans vs. tariff-loathing Democrats. Before party formation — officially, at least — one man started all the fighting over tariffs: President Washington's treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. His was actually a good idea at the time. To further America's nascent independence from hegemonic European powers, economic strength was needed, which meant protecting domestic industry.
From there, the equally formidable Henry Clay took the lead in what became the Whiggish and later Republican Party notion of "internal development" — the young Abe Lincoln, a strong supporting member of Clay's camp — in which high tariffs were a vital element. And once again, the late Mr. Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln were on the right side of history. Antebellum America's economic maturity required industry's protection.
I'm guessing that most modern Americans are unaware of how volatile those fightin' words of my long-gone relatives were throughout their preceding generations. Indeed, a bloody civil war damn near broke out three decades before the capitalized conflict of Lincoln's presidency.
For those who've forgotten or slept through their unfortunately tedious high school history classes, the incendiary Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 began — this should be of no belated surprise — in South Carolina (sort of a warmup to Fort Sumter). Its spark was twofold: the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations" — average rate, about 40% — and the Tariff of 1832 — intended as a kind of cooling-off reduction to around 35%.
The remedial act, however, didn't cut it. Not as far as most South Carolinians were concerned, anyway. Thus they declared both tariff acts null and void within the state and, in response to the centralized power's potential enforcement, they threatened secession.
The generally pro-South Andrew Jackson was in the White House, but disunion was a bit too much for him. He asked for and received a George W. pre-auth for military action against South Carolina; negotiations followed, a compromise tariff passed, an exacerbated crisis, averted. For a while, that is. Explosive Southern ire had been raised along with regional paranoia and an overt willingness to defy national authority and constitutionalism. Worse, much worse, was to come.
Small comparison can be made between then and now around the subject of tariffs — no states are nullifying and none is threatening secession, to note the obvious — yet one similarity from the 19th century writ large does exist. Historians debate the real value of high tariffs to America's industrial development, especially during the Gilded Age, yet there is no debate about the corruptive influence of those tariffs.
Some domestic industries looked to strong protectionism as merely a means to rent-seeking, while virtually all sectors sought preferential treatment in tariff rates via the congressionally popular means of bribery. The graft became so bad — it had morphed into the unavoidably noticeable among the public — the Sixteenth Amendment's income tax came along as a Progressive Era replacement for tariff revenue.
The embryonic Great Depression's Smoot-Hawley, an observable disaster in itself, contributed 15 years later to the U.S. acting as the leader in establishing a far more workable system of international trade. Which leads us to today, literally.
"[Trump's] punishing levies — which are expected to drive up prices for American consumers, and have spooked many businesses around the world — officially took effect just after midnight, marking a significant step forward in his attempt to reorder global trade," writes The NY Times. "Mr. Trump formalized those rates in a series of executive orders that he signed last week, imposing duties up to 50 percent on about 90 countries."
Leave it up to the infinitely decrepit mind of Donald J. Trump to whipsaw us back to those days of outlandish tariffs, what with their stinging costs, inherent corruption and global tumult. Somewhere, a distant relation of mine — an irascible old geezer straight out of the 19th century — is giving supreme decrepitness a high five.