In December 1887, President Grover Cleveland, frustrated with Congress’s unwillingness to compromise on any form of tariff reform, devoted the entirety of his annual message to Congress to a resounding demand for immediate downward tariff revision. “[O]ur present tariff laws, the vicious, inequitable, and illogical source of unnecessary taxation, ought to be at once revised and amended.” The president attacked the system of high import barriers not just because he did not subscribe to the protectionist developmental philosophy at its core but also because he could not square the large federal budget surplus it created with his classical liberal concept of limited government. “When we consider that the theory of our institutions guarantees to every citizen the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of the Government which protects him, it is plain that the exaction of more than this is indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice.”Footnote 1 With his message, Cleveland aligned the American party system around the tariff question and, in a conscious political move, established the tariff as the main subject of contestation during the following presidential campaign, in what came to be known as the Great Tariff Debate of 1888.Footnote 2 This debate permeated nearly all aspects of American politics and engaged Americans from all spheres of life in the ubiquitous discussions.Footnote 3
By all means, the president’s message represented a calculated affront to the tariff’s (mostly) Republican defenders in Congress. Cleveland, the first Democrat elected to the presidency since James Buchanan, launched a full-frontal attack on the system of import tariff protectionism that the Republican Party had established during its continuous rule beginning with the enactment of the Morrill Tariff in 1861. Given the sweeping demands and profound criticism of the tariff system contained in Cleveland’s message, it is remarkable that the president specifically exempted one group. Workers, Cleveland emphasized, should not suffer from the drastic tariff cuts he demanded. “[T]he reduction of taxation demanded should be so measured as not to necessitate or justify either the loss of employment by the workingman or the lessening of his wages.”Footnote 4 The fact that even an ardent opponent of tariff protectionism like Cleveland regarded it as expedient to include this caveat in his otherwise unreserved attack points to the potency and pervasiveness of a ubiquitous trope in the American tariff discussions of the late nineteenth century: the protectionist wage argument. Protectionists of all kinds—wealthy industrialists, Republican politicians, and also some labor leaders—proclaimed repeatedly that tariff protectionism’s main beneficiaries were American workers. Tariffs, they argued, secured jobs and high wages by protecting laborers against competition from low foreign wages.
Protectionists did not just canonize the wage argument in their campaign books and political speeches; they actively courted workers to join their ranks. While this tactic might seem reasonable for politicians seeking to build and enlarge popular support for their policies, industrialists’ heavy involvement in agitational activities directed at workers—along with their emphasis on workers’ benefits from tariff protectionism—is puzzling when contrasted with the fact that the labor disputes of the era consistently highlighted a fierce and fundamental conflict of interest between workers and industrialists. Beginning with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a wave of strikes and violent clashes, often referred to as the Great Upheaval, between discontented workers and their bosses, who were regularly supported by local, state, and even national authorities, put workers’ dissatisfaction and their demands on the nation’s political agenda: living wages, safe working conditions, and shorter working hours. The 1880s alone witnessed a total of almost 10,000 strikes and lockouts. Workers fought for a share of the enormous wealth that their hands produced, as well as a secure position within industrial capitalism; and, as the era’s violent clashes demonstrated, the main obstacles to their declared aims were the opposing interests of their bosses. It was hard to escape the insight that capital and labor interests were in fundamental opposition to each other.Footnote 5
In the late nineteenth century, the United States witnessed frequent, intense, and violent clashes between workers and their bosses while simultaneously hearing wealthy industrialists’ claims that the tariff mainly worked in the interest of American workers. The simultaneity of these remarkably different patterns regarding capital-labor relations begs an explanation. Why did many protectionist-minded capitalists of the late nineteenth century make labor’s fate the core and center of their argument? How did they reconcile the intense courting of industrial workers on the tariff issue with the unavoidable insight that capital and labor were in a clear and robust conflict of interest regularly demonstrated to contemporaries by strikes, lockouts, and often violence? Why was their argument so pervasive in contemporary discourse that even as mighty an opponent as Grover Cleveland had to recognize its appeal? Moreover, what wider conclusions about Gilded Age elite protectionists’ ideas about labor, its role in industrial society, and particularly its relationship to capital can be drawn from popularist agitation focused on and directed at laborers?
Scholarship on American tariff history is extensive and has, for the most part, recognized the crucial role the wage argument played in the work of nineteenth-century American protectionists. However, the argument is mostly noted in passing and often in reference to its use in the political arena, especially in campaign speeches and congressional debates.Footnote 6 A detailed analysis of how industrialists attempted to use the wage argument to bring workers into the protectionist camp remains a desideratum. Taking the American Protective Tariff League (APTL), a highly influential and industrialist-dominated protectionist interest group that functioned as the popular mouthpiece of elite protectionists as a case study, this article seeks to address this gap in the historiography. The analysis focuses mainly on the 1880s and 1890s when the tariff issue was most prominent as a national political topic. First, I introduce the APTL as a dominant political actor within the mainstream of late nineteenth-century American protectionism from which wider conclusions about the ideological and political nature of the protectionist wage argument, as it was presented by industrial elites, can be drawn. In the second section, I analyze APTL agitational material and attempt to reconstruct the APTL’s vision of industrial labor relations with regard to the tariff question. The APTL, I argue, advertised high wages and protection from cheap foreign competition as protectionism’s main benefits for workers. Beyond that, industrial protectionists also presented the tariff as a tool of social cohesion, an economic cure that could calm, and perhaps even overcome, the fierce clashes between capital and labor. In this line of thought, the tariff functioned as an economic device but also as a social and political tool that could be used to mediate and pacify contradicting material interests. In this way, elite protectionists’ use of the wage argument as a rhetorical device to draw workers to their side mirrored the political strategy of the Republican Party, which used the tariff and the revenues it generated as a way to cohere and consolidate the broad and otherwise somewhat incoherent voting coalition that stood behind and benefitted from the Republican industrialization project. Finally, I contrast the APTL’s ideas about labor and the tariff question with workers’ reactions by analyzing organized labor’s response. I focus on the positions of various labor groups and representatives such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Knights of Labor, and socialist politicians including Eugene V. Debs. As far as it is possible to determine, only some segments of the workforce were receptive to the kind of protectionist agitation that the APTL disseminated. But even most labor protectionists remained skeptical regarding direct cooperation with industrialists, even when it served their interests.
Popularizing Protectionism: The APTL and Late Nineteenth-Century Tariff Agitation
The APTL, founded in 1885, was the most important public pressure group attempting to muster public support for protectionist policies beyond Congress in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 7 The League essentially functioned as a Republican campaign organization and worked in close contact with party officials. It published and distributed pamphlets, brochures, and books, engaged speakers, organized rallies, and maintained a national organization with state and local chapters. Moreover, the APTL published a weekly newspaper out of New York City, the American Economist, exclusively devoted to the promulgation of protectionist ideology. This publication contained political commentary on current events, reprints of political speeches, responses to opposing views, information on tariffs and trade, cartoons, and news about the APTL. In addition, the League maintained a large network of local Republican-protectionist newspapers reprinting and circulating articles from the American Economist, thus ensuring a wide reach of the APTL’s agitation. The League’s headquarters were situated in New York City, a hotbed of free trade activism but also home to many of the APTL’s members.
By its tenth anniversary in 1895, arguably at the height of the APTL’s political influence and reach, 3,847 newspapers nationwide cooperated with the League. In the same year, the APTL had 955 members and 2,099 so-called correspondents, quasi-officials responsible for the local distribution of pamphlets. Despite the League’s self-representation as a national organization, a closer look at the distribution of members and correspondents across the nation conveys a stark contrast between centers of support for the APTL and centers of its agitational focus. In 1889, for example, more than half of the members hailed from the Northeast, with roughly a third of members from New York State alone. A similar pattern can be discerned for the available numbers of so-called “Defenders,” an advanced membership category that mainly contributed to the financing of the organization. The distribution of official correspondents, however, shows a remarkably different pattern. In 1892, only about 10 percent of correspondents were active in the Northeast, while more than half were in the Midwest and roughly a third were in the South.Footnote 8 As these numbers illustrate, the APTL found its base in the protected industries of the Northeast but sought to extend popular support for protectionist policies to other regions.
The APTL also served as a forum for private individuals with protectionist convictions, as well as interest-driven industrialists and Republican politicians. The organization’s leadership consisted mainly of wealthy industrialists, mostly from protected industries,Footnote 9 along with high-level Republican Party politicians. These industrialists were also the main financial force behind the organization.Footnote 10 Given the composition of its leadership and membership, the APTL mirrored both the economic interests of certain branches of industry as well as the Republican mainstream position on the tariff issue. Fiercely, the League combatted any attempt at abolishing, lowering, or reforming import tariffs. Especially in the 1880s and 1890s, this type of radical protectionism was hardly challenged within the Republican Party. While industrialists, especially from the Northeast, were disproportionally represented in the APTL, nominally the League understood itself as a national organization that did not represent any specific segment of society or industry.Footnote 11 It is not possible to reconstruct the exact financial backing of the organization, yet it is clear that—despite frequent public efforts to deny such accusations—the APTL relied heavily on donations from wealthy individuals and companies to uphold its activities.Footnote 12 Members could join for an annual fee of $100, an amount large enough to effectively bar working- and even middle-class Americans from the organization.Footnote 13 Thus the APTL was, essentially, an elite organization.
The APTL did more than just talk and write about workers and the labor question. It addressed laborers directly and attempted to influence their thinking on tariff matters. The media for this agitation usually consisted of leaflets or pamphlets, which the APTL printed and distributed in the millions. With regard to this heavy focus on industrial workers, the APTL’s agitation can be seen as popular. Given its elite backing and leadership, however, the APTL should not be misunderstood as a bottom-up manifestation of popular protectionist sentiment among the larger population, even if some of the League’s publications might suggest differently. Rather, the APTL functioned as a popularist voice of orthodox elite protectionism.
It is this duality in purpose—an elite protectionist organization directing its agitation at the broader population—that makes the APTL a significant case study for analyzing the ways in which Republican politicians and industrial elites turned the tariff into a tool to draw broader sections of American society, especially industrial workers, to their side and into the Republican voting coalition. The APTL was not unique in this aspect, but surely it was the most outspoken and visible of the late nineteenth-century elite protectionist organizations attempting to win over workers.Footnote 14 As Richard Bensel notes, the importance of the tariff issue on a macrolevel lay less in its economic implications for the rapid industrialization of the American economy but mostly in its potential as a political tool to tie different social groups into a Republican voting bloc. By using tariff revenue to finance an opulent pension system for Union veterans, which comprised the largest slice of the federal budget in the 1880s, and by including goods such as sugar and wool in the list of protected items to extend the Republican voter base beyond the industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest, the Republican Party effectively built its public support base around the tariff issue.Footnote 15 In extension of this logic, the popularization of protectionism among ordinary Americans, but especially industrial workers, can be understood as yet another cornerstone of this political strategy.Footnote 16
Winning the Workers: The APTL’s Labor Agitation
Leaflets and pamphlets, the quintessential media of the Gilded Age’s populist campaign style, were also the preferred media of the APTL’s tariff agitation. With their short texts, bold letters, simple but drastic language, and high circulation, these types of media best suited the aim of turning the tariff—an economic topic of immense complexity, yet somewhat alienated from ordinary Americans’ lived experiences—into a hot topic of public debate. Many of the leaflets, published by the APTL under the label “The Defender,” also contained explicit statements regarding circulation and target audience. They featured subsections such as, “A Short Talk to Workingmen,” and requests like, “After Reading Hand to a Friend.”Footnote 17 One leaflet was designed in a question-and-answer format giving concise and easily understandable “Answers to a Workingman’s Questions.”Footnote 18 In addressing workers, the pamphlets’ tone oscillated between a form of assumed or appropriated camaraderie and a paternalistic attempt to educate workers from above by giving explicitly simplified explanations of complex economic matters. It was thus in media like pamphlets and leaflets—and, to a lesser degree, in newspaper articles and brochures—that protectionism was translated from an elite interest into a popular campaign issue.Footnote 19
Wages were the core and center of the protectionist argument that the APTL offered to workers. Labor and wages were already central themes in the principles of the organization, as adopted in 1886. “The object of the American Protective Tariff League … is, by adequate duties upon imported products, to protect American labor, whether Agricultural, Manufacturing, Mining or Commercial, against the competition of low-priced labor in foreign countries.”Footnote 20 Like most protectionists, the League proclaimed that the relatively high wages of American workers, and the resulting standard of living, critically hinged on sufficiently high import tariffs that prevented direct competition with low European wages. A typical pamphlet on “Wage Earners under Protection and Free-Trade” delivered a wage comparison between the United States and several European countries. It showed that U.S. wages were significantly ahead of the “starvation labor of Europe.” The central message was plain and simple: “God save America from such wages!”Footnote 21 Another leaflet simply declared, “Free-trade and high wages in America is an impossibility.”Footnote 22 Such slogans, as well as extensive comparison tables of wages and prices, were commonplace in pamphlets of the APTL, and they also featured regularly in the American Economist.Footnote 23 (Fig. 1)
Figure 1. “Free Trade’s Attack upon American Labor,” cartoon printed by the APTL illustrating the supposedly disastrous effects of the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894 on American Workers. American Economist, August 21, 1896.
The League’s principles mentioned the wage argument directly but also refuted the claim that protectionism was responsible for higher living prices. “It [the APTL] maintains that cost of production and expenses of living are diminished and rates of wages increased, with the advance in the productive power of labor; and that the growth of this productive power depends upon the opportunities and rewards for intelligent effort afforded by a high standard of wages.”Footnote 24 Another pamphlet, English and American Wages and Pauperism, similarly confronted the claim that high import tariffs significantly raised consumer prices. It presented a comparison of British and American wages as well as consumer prices, all showing American wages higher and consumer prices lower. Addressing American workers, it concluded, “We trust our wage earners will give these facts a little thought, and not allow Free-Trade falsehoods about advancing prices to make them overlook Protection truths about advancing wages.”Footnote 25 A pamphlet, titled Workingmen and the Tariff, was even more extensive in providing “Facts and Figures for Wage Earners.” It offered page-long tables and lists containing detailed overviews of the prices of specific consumer products in Britain and the United States. The pamphlet also informed readers about wage development in the two countries, again showing American advantages in both wages and consumer prices.Footnote 26 The pamphlet asserted, “The doctrine of Protection has here been vindicated by evidence which has all the force of demonstration. When assailed, it is assailed not by evidence, but by misrepresentation and abuse.”Footnote 27 While it is difficult to examine the numbers’ accuracy and even more difficult to ascertain their impression on potential readers, the prominence of statistics demonstrates a desire to substantiate qualitative claims with quantitative proof and thus illustrates the argumentative lure that statistics could hold even within the polemic pamphlet culture of the American Gilded Age.
Beyond merely denying that consumer prices were higher under protectionism, the APTL explained this development using a classic tenet of protectionist reasoning: internal competition. As protectionists had long declared, protective tariffs might initially grant the short-term advantage of lessened competition to domestic producers and thus briefly cause higher consumer prices. In the long run, however, these higher consumer prices would be leveled and even reversed by the rise of internal competition, enhanced technological development, and the market mechanism of supply and demand.Footnote 28 The APTL declared, “ Prices of home-made protected articles may be enhanced for a time after the tariff goes into effect, but the advance is only transitory, for improvements in machinery, development of skill, system, competition, and economy, will ultimately overcome the augmentation of prices, and even reduce them below the lowest point ever reached while goods were supplied by foreign manufacturers.”Footnote 29
The wage argument, coupled with the repudiation of claims of higher consumer prices, constituted the core argument of the APTL’s labor agitation. This prominence comes as no surprise; by the 1880s, the wage argument had already been a protectionist shibboleth for decades. Early American protectionist theorists, including Alexander Hamilton and Henry Carey, had stressed protectionism’s potential for industrial development and, consequently, focused their argument on the developmentalist infant industry argument. In the Jacksonian period, though, when the tariff first became an extremely divisive topic of national politics, the wage argument rose to prominence in protectionists’ reasoning.Footnote 30 Throughout the nineteenth century it remained extremely popular, with Republican politicians routinely attacking Democratic tariff proposals as “bills to reduce American wages.”Footnote 31 The supposed wage benefits of protective tariffs were among the main policy proposals the Republican Party offered to American workers in the Gilded Age. It was included, in one form or another, in all Republican Party platforms between 1876 and 1900.Footnote 32 It was so pervasive that even the argument’s eager proponents seemed at times bored of its notoriety. As early as 1880, the American Iron and Steel Association opened a pamphlet dedicated to informing workers about the topic of wages rather unenthusiastically: “That the workingmen of the United States have no cause to complain of the results of our Protective policy ought not to require verification at this late day, but occasionally a workingman may be found who has given but little thought to a subject which is to him of so much importance.”Footnote 33 Especially during the Great Debate of 1888, the wage argument against European pauper labor was ubiquitous on the protectionist side and, as seen above, could not be escaped by tariff reformers like Cleveland.Footnote 34 It was a powerful political tool. (Fig. 2)
Figure 2. “The Workingman’s Stocking,” cartoon from the magazine Judge, illustrates the protectionist wage argument by showing a John Bull doll as a Christmas present from Grover Cleveland to “American Workingmen,” bringing “English Rates of Wages” and “Free Trade and Less Work.” Judge, December 23, 1893.
Nationalistic, nativist, and Anglophobic sentiments were strongly intertwined with the protectionist wage argument, and the APTL heavily exploited this xenophobic potential. As indicated above, Europe was the usual comparison point for American protectionists. European but especially British pauper labor, protectionists maintained, was a lurking danger to American wages, working conditions, and living standards. In many ways, this idea conformed to the omnipresent Anglophobic stereotypes of the Gilded Age, which were especially notorious among American workers.Footnote 35 Yet Anglophobic attacks were not just a concession to general contemporary sentiment but also a specific characteristic of American protectionism. Since most post-Civil War American free traders looked to Great Britain as a role model and some also openly affiliated themselves with the Cobden Club, a British free trade organization, American protectionists were highly suspicious of any British influence on American trade policy and warned constantly of a British “Conspiracy of Free Trade” that supposedly threatened to attack the American protective tariff system and thus, in the protectionist mind, American wages and national prosperity.Footnote 36
During the Great Tariff Debate of 1888, for example, the APTL aggressively attempted to portray Grover Cleveland and the Democrats as mere mouthpieces of British free trade interests and willing servants of the Cobden Club. The League framed the election as a quintessential choice between British free trade and American protectionism. Shortly before the election, the APTL printed its own seal next to the Cobden Club’s under the headline, “Under Which Emblem?” (Fig. 3) The league commented: “The Citizens of the United States on November 6th will decide for a generation, between Free Foreign Trade which has cursed every nation ever blessed (?) with it, and Protection with its benedictions to all nations. Here are the battle shields of the two parties. The British Cobden Club seal with its ‘Free-Trade,’ and the American Protective Tariff League seal with its emblems of Protection to home industries. Will you choose the Cobden Club with its Free Trade strap and buckle, to bind you in perpetual poverty, or the Protection emblem with its plow, anchor, loom, and anvil—emblems of agriculture, manufacture and commerce—the emblems of a nation’s strength.”Footnote 37
Figure 3. “Under Which Emblem?” published by the APTL during the Great Tariff Debate of 1888, framed the election as a choice between British free trade and American protectionism. Tariff League Bulletin, October 12, 1888.
Another telling example of the APTL’s use of Anglophobic stereotypes can be observed in its leaflet, Why Irishmen should be Protectionists. It merged conspiratorial protectionist Anglophobia with the extant Anglophobic prejudices of working-class Irish Americans. Painting a grim picture of Irish history, in which English free trade ideas and their execution upon Ireland were the root cause of the country’s economic and political misery, the pamphlet attempted to project Irish resentments against Britain onto the American tariff debate: “ [The Irish] have not only their impoverished country as a warning against the evils of Free-Trade, but they have American industry and American prosperity as examples of the benefits of Protection. Once they have been driven from their homes by Free-Trade. They will hardly want to suffer a second experience.”Footnote 38 The targets of this kind of xenophobic attacks were, however, not set in stone but rather adapted over time. For example, a 1919 pamphlet on the subject of “Oriental Competition” portrayed the low standard of Japanese wages (“starvation wages from the American standard”) as the great danger to American workers. “Look out for the Japanese menace!” the pamphlet warned.Footnote 39
But beyond the wage argument and xenophobic attacks, the APTL also addressed the general relationship between capital and labor. Regularly, the organization explicitly connected workers’ interest in protectionism, namely higher wages, to capitalists’ interest in it, namely protection from foreign competition in the American market. The League openly promoted cooperation between labor and capital as its ultimate goal. Capital’s concurring interest in protective tariffs was thus not hidden but explicitly highlighted in the argument presented to workers. Press coverage of the APTL’s founding had already noted this theme of uniting the common protectionist interest of capital and labor under the organization’s umbrella. “The Protective League will by its publications try to prove that the protection which they have and insist upon is equally beneficial to the workingmen and the capitalists.”Footnote 40 This peculiar union of interests remained a constant feature in the APTL’s agitation. Each issue of the American Economist proudly boasted the motto, “Devoted To The Protection Of American Labor And Industries,” in its nameplate.Footnote 41 The idea was even explicitly written into the APTL’s principles:
[T]he American Protective Tariff League proposes a union and organization of all industrial workers of America in defense and for the elevation of the American standard of wages, living and self-government.… In furtherance of this purpose, it appeals to all who share in the trials and achievements of American industry, whether wage-earners or wage-payers, to combine in support of a movement which, with their aid, will not only insure the triumph of the American system in America, and improve the condition of all our people, but, by its influence and example, advance the conditions of industrial life throughout the world.Footnote 42
The idea of national unity between capital and labor was also evoked by the League’s general secretary Robert P. Porter when he internally described the organization’s purpose in 1887:
It is not partisan, it is not an industrial organization, it is not a labor organization. It aims to unite all other organizations in the patriotic work. Its platform proposes to protect all American labor, whether agricultural, manufacturing, mining or commercial, against the competition of low-priced labor in foreign countries.… To accomplish this we urge the union of all industrial workers of America in defence and for the elevation of the American standard of wages, living and self-government.Footnote 43
It was thus not only different branches of industry that the APTL wanted to unite under the banner of protectionism; the League also aimed at uniting the otherwise so strongly diverging interests of industry and agriculture and, within industry, of capital and labor. This encompassing national union of interests that the APTL proposed was ultimately imagined as a defensive cooperation. As Porter further explained, it was the upsurge of free trade agitation in the 1880s that supposedly threatened the protectionist hold on national politics, and necessitated a solidified response:
In the past Protectionists have been divided, in the pursuit and defence of special local interests, while on the other hand the Free-trade hosts mustered in a solid phalanx, have been attacking with untiring energy the strongest citadel of the protective policy.… The necessity of more active and more extended work is therefore apparent. A solid front must be presented by Protectionists to the determined and united army of Free-traders, ready to attack the American system with all their force, wherever it appears that a majority of the people are in favor of Protection.Footnote 44
In essence, the APTL proclaimed that the tariff issue superseded all potential conflicts between workers of different industries, all conflicts between industry and agriculture, and, most importantly, all conflicts between capital and labor. Furthermore, at times the APTL suggested that, between the latter two, no conflict of interest existed. Rather, capital and labor were, in the APTL’s imagination, dependent upon each other in the creation of national prosperity. A typical presentation of that idea can be found in the American Economist in 1898: “True friendship for the toilers is not in setting labor against capital and capital against labor, but in harmonizing their interests, which are identical. That party is the true friend of labor which spends its time, not in abusing capital, but in making possible for capital to sell its products so that labor may have employment in producing more.”Footnote 45
The APTL drew the central conflict line of political economy not between capital and labor but between the American economy and other national economies. Protective tariffs as import barriers to foreign products were the real-world manifestation of this conflict line and simultaneously, as the APTL argued, the solution. With protective walls erected on the outside, the stage was set for the harmonious advancement of the American economy on the inside—to the common benefit of all. This idealized conceptualization of the American economy simply ignored the constant harsh and often violent clashes between workers and their employers that so characteristically shaped industrial relations during the Gilded Age. The APTL even claimed to address “all workers, whether employers or employed,” suggesting that a meaningful difference between the two groups did not exist.Footnote 46 (Fig. 4)
Figure 4. “Good News for Americans,” cartoon printed by the APTL in celebration of the passing of the protectionist Dingley Tariff. It illustrates the protectionist idea of a national “Harmony of Interests” between capital and labor. American Economist, July 23, 1897.
Like the wage argument, the theme of a protectionist union of interests between capital and labor and its nationalist implications were hardly new in protectionist thinking. Rather, this reasoning traced back to the antebellum period and the works of Henry Carey, who first developed the idea of a “Harmony of Interests.” To Carey, labor and capital were not adversaries, but rather necessary, equal, and harmonious components in the construction of a prosperous national economy, which, most of all, needed to be protected from aggressive outside competition through high import tariffs.Footnote 47 However, the prominence of the theme in the APTL’s agitation is remarkable given the political context of Gilded Age labor upheaval and the fact that the APTL remained, in essence, an association of wealthy industrialists. Seen in this light, the APTL’s labor agitation can also be interpreted as an attempt by industrialists to calm the raging labor conflicts of the period and to instigate a less conflictual relationship with workers. The soothing tone with regard to capital’s relation to labor, and the disseminated image of capitalists as harmonious benefactors of workers, are clear indications of this attempt. The APTL even occasionally alluded to the labor conflicts of the era but, unsurprisingly, supported capital’s side of the bargain: “The danger now is that, under the pressure of popular prejudice against capitalists and employers, the process of hampering great industrial enterprises by measures looking exclusively to the benefit of wage receivers may be carried so far as to drive capital out of business, and thus kill the goose that lays golden eggs for millions of people.”Footnote 48
Also, like many other protectionists, the APTL’s endorsement of protective tariffs turned directly against unions and labor organizations.Footnote 49 Unions, the League argued, were not a proper means to secure American workers’ wages and to guarantee their jobs. “Trade and labor unions are powerless against the demoralizing effects of Free Foreign Trade,” declared the APTL, pointing to the harsh living conditions and low wages of British workers despite the supposed omnipresence of unions in Britain.Footnote 50 In line with their focus on the competition between the American economy and other national economies as the major economic conflict, it was not unions and self-organization, but rather tariffs and cooperation with capitalists, which the APTL advised in order to advance the wages and living conditions of American workers.
On closer examination, a great deal of ambivalence toward labor’s non-tariff-related demands can be detected in the APTL’s use of nativist tropes. As demonstrated above, the APTL attempted to capitalize on the strong nativist sentiments prevalent among workers. It also addressed labor’s strident resistance to immigration. While the APTL, being essentially a single-issue public pressure group, did not endorse anti-immigration legislation, it repeatedly pointed out that workers’ opposition to low-wage immigrant labor had a logical counterpart in the support of high import tariffs. Foreign goods entering the country without charge were equated with immigrant workers willing to work for lower wages. For example, an 1888 pamphlet against the Democratic Mills Bill made this point quite drastically: “Brothers! … Fight [the Mills Bill] without delay, and fight it to its death; and then make your Tariff so Protective as to shut out cheap foreign labor in the form of manufactured goods.”Footnote 51 More sober versions of the argument could be found in the American Economist:
There is no difference between bringing over foreign workmen by contract to work in this country at their home wages and contracting to bring over and import free into this country the goods produced at their homes by those workmen at their pauper wages; except that in the former case the little pittance which those workmen earned would be spent in this country while in the latter case—i.e. under Free-Trade—it would be spent in their own countries.Footnote 52
The publication went on to state: “So far as immigration is related to labor, every argument in favor of any restriction to it … holds just as strongly and even more strongly against Free-Trade. American laboring men would do well to give attention to this fact.”Footnote 53
The case of immigration policy, however, was a slippery slope for the APTL. Clearly, the case of immigration restriction served as an anchor to further attach protectionist ideas to wider labor sentiments. The instrumental nature of this approach was especially evident given the difference of interest capitalists and laborers held regarding the immigration of low-wage workers. Whereas employers benefited heavily from possibly reducing the wage-share of their production costs, laborers resisted immigration, fearing a drastic reduction of wages through the resulting overabundance of labor.Footnote 54 Immigration’s usefulness as an issue of protectionist agitation thus held a certain ambivalence. While it presented an opportunity to tie protectionism to labor nativism, it also unearthed existing conflicts of interests between capital and labor and, thus, ran counter to the APTL’s idealized vision of a national union of interests under the banner of protectionism and, consequently, only featured marginally in the APTL’s agitation. (Fig. 5)
Figure 5. “Wilson the Philanthropist,” cartoon from Judge magazine illustrating the protectionist wage argument by showing American workers’ wage competition with “European Pauper Labor.” Judge, January 20, 1894.
“We have avoided most scrupulously and carefully that controversial field”: The Labor Movement’s Contested Neutrality on the Tariff Issue
The ambivalences of the APTL’s labor agitation, especially its opposition to labor unions and its stance on immigration, should prompt scholars to question how genuine the APTL’s concern for workers’ fate in the tariff question was. Obviously, a group of industrialists, demanding tariff protection highly beneficial to their enterprises and spending large amounts of money to court laborers, raises suspicion. It is extremely difficult to determine to which extent the labor agitation of the APTL was more than a cynical maneuver designed to form a popular support base for the execution of industrialists’ economic interests. Some elements of the APTL’s agitation, like its ambivalent stance on the immigration question and its opposition to unions, certainly suggest a high level of tactical motivation. In the same vein, the very fact that the drastic labor struggles of the Gilded Age had unfolded at a time when large parts of the American industrial economy had already experienced high tariff protection rendered the idea that high tariffs could represent a cure to this very problem an illusion grounded, quite obviously, in strategical considerations rather than ideological convictions. Yet this fact does not rule out in principle the possibility that the protectionist convictions of industrialists and their promulgation of the wage argument were sincere. However obvious the tactical aspects in the APTL’s labor agitation and the economic interest behind it appear, the conclusion that, therefore, the League’s arguments and ideas must have been insincere or appeared illogical to contemporaries is not justified.Footnote 55 Ultimately, the question of ideological sincerity is of secondary importance. It is, thus, perhaps more fruitful to examine the effects of protectionist labor agitation by turning to contemporary reactions from laborers.
How did laborers react to the APTL’s courting and protectionist agitation in general? To what degree were they willing to support a union of interest proposed by wealthy industrialists in furtherance of the supposed common benefits from tariff protectionism? As noted above, the APTL was an elite organization. Despite its loud call to unite capitalists and workers under the banner of protection, there were almost no labor representatives among the organization’s ranks, a fact that was suspiciously absent from the APTL’s publications. In fact, as far as it can be grasped from membership lists, only the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (the nation’s largest union) and its former president, John Jarrett, were members of the League. The APTL was so proud of this fact that it printed a full-page facsimile of the Association’s accession letter in its bulletin. (Fig. 6)Footnote 56 The Iron and Steel Workers were notorious for their protectionist convictions. Jarrett was at the time described as a “protectionist of the extremest school” and was an active tariff lobbyist as the secretary of the American Tinned Plate Association.Footnote 57 Beyond these examples, not much evidence exists for the active participation of labor representatives in the League’s activities. At the APTL’s inaugural meeting in 1885, there was one labor delegate, from the Knights of Labor, in attendance. But even this representative remained, perhaps symptomatically, skeptical regarding labor’s potential benefits from participating in the organization. He hoped the League would “be not so much to protect American Industry as to protect American citizens. It should prevent them from coming in competition with Europeans who had been accustomed to living on less money and consequently could work for less, and it should also guard them against pauper labor.” The representative also feared the APTL’s financing through subscriptions and donations would “drive the association into the hands of a few men who contributed.”Footnote 58
Figure 6. Facsimile of the accession letter of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers to the APTL as it was printed by the League. Tariff League Bulletin, Supplement, June 15, 1888.
However, the fact that this representative’s remarks also mirrored the APTL’s wage argument suggests that a shared insistence on the importance of protective tariffs as safeguards against low foreign wages existed, at least among some industrial laborers. Yet it is very difficult to ascertain workers’ political thinking and feelings on the tariff issue. Since the available sources hardly convey authentic workers’ sentiments on the tariff issue, most tariff histories are concerned with elites, especially politicians, industrialists, businessmen, intellectuals, and journalists. Certainly, due to diverging regional and branch interests, not all workers were affected equally by protective tariffs. Widely diverging tariff rates on various products, and also the (in part) drastic changes of these specific tariff rates over time meant that some laborers worked in highly protected industries, whereas others toiled in industries without any tariff protection. Nevertheless, the working population at large, understood mainly as consumers, constituted, in many ways, the logical target group not for protectionists but for tariff reformers and free traders. Protectionism, they argued, made workers’ lives more expensive as consumers had to pay the excise costs created by the tariff.Footnote 59 Tariff protectionism, then, had an appeal only for a certain segment of the labor force: laborers working in protected industries. To them, protectionism meant maintaining and fostering an industry, and thus employment, that might not survive without protection. In addition, workers in protected industries were promised—at least nominally—higher wages than would have been possible without protection.Footnote 60 The Republican Party’s electoral success in the industrial Northeast might be an indication of protectionist sentiment among local workers; after all, it was they who cast the millions of ballots for protectionist politicians, not their bosses.Footnote 61
As with other political issues of the era, looking at the organized labor movement and its relationship to the tariff issue might give a more nuanced indication of workers’ political stance on the matter. While the organized labor movement nominally only represented roughly 10 percent of American workers, its leaders still expressed the aspirations, fears, and political demands of wider segments of the working population and conveyed them to the broader public.Footnote 62 Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the organized labor movement, in all its shades, showed great interest in the tariff issue, even though opinions varied widely. Many individual unions, like seamen, mine workers, musicians, locomotive engineers, firemen, and enginemen, for example, were notorious for their opposition to high tariffs.Footnote 63 Other unions, especially the influential iron and steel workers, were fiercely protectionist. At times, this protectionist sentiment also bridged individual unions’ organizational capacity and created powerful demonstrations of labor protectionism. In 1894, for example, union workers, mostly from the Northeast, formed the Workingmen’s Protective Tariff League to protest the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff; several thousand of them even marched on the streets of Washington when the Senate debated the bill.Footnote 64 Even more prominently, in November 1928, the strong protectionist sentiment among some unions resulted in the creation of a national organization, America’s Wage Earners Protective Conference (WEPC), led by Matthew Woll, president of the International Photo-Engravers Union. The WEPC encompassed seventeen different unions, representing roughly 250,000 workers, and became a powerful political force in the late 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote 65 Nevertheless, these protectionist sentiments never represented more than a vociferous minority among American workers and also never bridged the regional divide. Industrial protectionist groups like the APTL were not directly involved in this kind of labor protectionism but did express strong support in their print outlets.Footnote 66
Given the widely diverging interests within the labor movement, the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, the two most important national labor organizations of the era, were forced to assume a position of strict neutrality on the tariff. This neutrality should, however, not be confused with disinterest or a lack of engagement. On the contrary, precisely because the tariff was such a hotly debated topic and opposing opinions on it were so entrenched among labor representatives, stalling the issue altogether was the only way to stop it from splitting the labor movement. A certain difficulty in agreeing on common demands was a constant problem for the national American labor movement, given the heterogeneous composition of the workforce.Footnote 67 But the tariff’s divisive potential was still outstanding. Whatever their precise position on the tariff might have been, workers were not a disinterested passive mass, impressionable and susceptible to simple propaganda tricks. They were actively engaged and strongly committed to the tariff debate. The case of the AFL is a good illustration of this contested neutrality.Footnote 68 An umbrella organization of, at its peak, over 100 individual unions from a varied spectrum of industry branches, the AFL struggled to find a common position on the tariff. The widely diverging opinions among its member unions dictated that the AFL effectively banished tariff discussions from its annual conventions between 1882 and the 1940s.Footnote 69
The reality of how divisive and controversial the tariff could be among workers had already become obvious during the AFL’s early years. When the first convention of the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions, the precursor to the AFL, met in Pittsburgh in November 1881, the delegates were already split between protectionists, free traders, and neutralists.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, John Jarrett, chairman of the convention, pushed a protectionist tariff plank into the Federation’s political platform. The issue, though, was highly controversial; a motion to remove the tariff proposal from the agenda was only narrowly defeated by a vote of 38 to 35. One delegate aptly described the tense atmosphere: “If there is any rock on which this congress of Trade Unions will split, it is the tariff plank.”Footnote 71 Cassandra-like, this prophecy proved to be true only a year later, when the 1882 convention removed the protectionist plank from the platform and adopted a strictly neutral stand, causing the infuriated Jarrett and his fellow iron and steel workers to march out of the convention and leave the Federation.Footnote 72 As a result of these controversies, the neutrality policy remained intact from 1882 onward, despite the tariff’s prominence as a national political issue. Writing in 1906, AFL president Samuel Gompers referred to the tumultuous conventions of 1881 and 1882 when lauding the neutrality policy: “[T]he Federation eliminated from its declarations any expression in favor of either protection or free trade. Since then the American Federation of Labor, as such, has never been called upon to either discuss or express itself upon either policy, and we have found this to be the most advantageous to the movement in this country.”Footnote 73 As late as 1929, AFL president William Green could proudly look back on the organization’s stand on the tariff issue and proclaim, “The American Federation of Labor has never committed itself to the support of a protective tariff or free trade. We have avoided most scrupulously and carefully that controversial field.”Footnote 74
The AFL’s conventions seldomly addressed the tariff issue. And in these rare instances, it proved its potential to cause considerable uproar. In 1906, for example, the convention rejected two proposals for specific tariff eliminations, whereas it approved a proposal to demand higher tariffs on other specific goods. This breach of the neutrality policy caused tremendous upheaval. The pursuing vote to repeal this decision—and thus stay faithful to the traditional neutrality position—was only narrowly defeated (75 to 79 votes). As a result, the subsequent 1907 convention forwarded all tariff proposals directly to the resolution committee and thus withdrew them from general discussion because the tariff proposals of the previous debate had “caused about as much commotion as anything in the convention,” according to AFL vice president James Duncan. The proceeding records drily noted, “The committee referred the resolution to the Executive Council so they could act in concert along the lines desired … without giving a chance to open the flood gates in this convention to the tariff question.”Footnote 75
The AFL’s contested policy of neutrality, which arose from the strongly opposing views of different unions within this national umbrella organization, was somewhat mirrored by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). This association was formed in 1895 as a national federation to voice the political demands of manufacturers, especially their hostility to the advances of labor legislation, and usually acted as the AFL’s quintessential antagonist. Yet the NAM also struggled to find a position on the tariff issue acceptable to its diverse membership. Whereas many manufacturers associated with the NAM traditionally leaned toward the Republican Party and demanded tariff protection for their industry, other manufacturers had outgrown the American market and sought lower tariffs to gain easier access to foreign markets. In fact, this intensified search for overseas markets was another key issue leading to the creation of the NAM in the first place. As a result of the diverse composition of its membership, the NAM took a somewhat illogical position. It supported the maintenance of the protective tariff system but also called for a policy of trade reciprocity, which entailed offering lower tariff rates for specific products in order to open up foreign markets by negotiating trade treaties with foreign nations. Reciprocity became a major point of conflict within the Republican camp in the early twentieth century and was bitterly opposed by the APTL and other orthodox protectionist groups.Footnote 76 The fact that the AFL and the NAM, the national representative organizations of labor and industry, respectively, experienced similar difficulties in formulating a coherent tariff policy illustrates the enormous divisive potential of the tariff issue but also points to the decisive role of regional and industry-branch-related differences that seem to have superseded other factors in determining trade policy preferences.
If the AFL and the history of its contested neutrality are any indication, workers hotly debated the tariff issue. Opinions were polarized and, importantly, deeply entrenched. Combined with strong regional and branch differences, it seems that mainly self-interest drove workers’ positioning on the tariff issue. Protection from low-wage competition and secured employment were obviously attractive to industrial workers from protected industries. Presumably out of self-interest, they were acutely aware of the advantage protective tariffs granted to them and were willing to defend that advantage. Whether or not elite protectionist agitation like the APTL’s played a role in solidifying this position is difficult to determine. Conversely, though, the stiff resistance that labor protectionists met from other representatives indicates that free trade convictions were strongly entrenched in other segments of the labor force, as well. Therefore, it seems highly unlikely that elite protectionist agitation had much success in converting workers who had not already shared a conviction for protectionism.
Indeed, industrialists’ calls to unity under the banner of protectionism even had the adverse effect of rigidifying labor skepticism precisely because industrialists were so strongly and openly engaged in the matter. While the tariff issue was absent from the party’s election platforms of the era, Eugene V. Debs, himself a former railroad union officer and successive presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, aggressively argued for labor neutrality in the tariff debate. According to Debs:
So long as the present system of capitalism prevails and the few are allowed to own the nation’s industries, the toiling masses will be struggling in the hell of poverty as they are today. To tell them that juggling with the tariff will change this beastly and disgraceful condition is to insult their intelligence.… The exploited wage-slaves of free trade England and of the highly protected United States are the victims of the same capitalism; in England the politicians tell them they are suffering because they have no protective tariff and in the United States they tell them that the tariff is the cause of their poverty.Footnote 77
If the APTL and other protectionist industrialists drew the main conflict of the industrial economy between different national economies, Debs and other labor leaders contended that the conflict of interest between capital and labor was of overriding importance. In this socialist perspective, the tariff was, simply put, not a relevant issue for workers; rather, industrialists’ sudden interest in the fate of workers was primarily a cause for alarm. Given the primacy of the capital-labor conflict, the tariff debate, understood as a debate mostly among capitalists, held little promise for workers and could, in fact, be perceived at best as a noisy distraction from the real issues.Footnote 78
Taking a similar stand, Terence V. Powderly, Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, in 1890 directly rejected any type of labor courting typical for industrial organizations like the APTL: “‘Protection to American labor’ is the watchword on which the American manufacturer enters the halls of Congress to ask for an increase of tariff on the articles manufactured in his workshops, and by his employees; but ‘every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost,’ is the motto which would be emblazoned on his shield if he wrote the truth upon it.”Footnote 79 Displaying the nativist undertones typical of the American labor movement of the late nineteenth century, Powderly assumed the position of a worker who asked,
[W]hy is it that my employer so assiduously demands that a protective tariff be imposed on these articles under pretense of protecting the American workmen from foreign competition; why is it that he presents to me the petition to sign against the reduction of the tariff, telling me, as he does it, that it is to my interest to sign it, so that foreign cheap labor will not kill our industries, and at the same time be engaged in making terms with the foreign agent for the shipment of alien workmen to enter into competition with me and my fellow-laborers?Footnote 80
Conclusion
In summary, the labor argument proposed by the APTL can be described as twofold. First, the APTL focused heavily on the wage argument and maintained that protective tariffs shielded American workers against low-wage competition, usually from Europe. Tariffs, in that view, were a necessary safeguard guaranteeing high wages and a decent standard of living. To this end, the APTL attempted to channel labor’s nativist sentiments into an argument for high tariffs and against foreign, especially British, labor. What is more, the APTL proposed that labor, in pursuit of protected high wages, should cooperate with industrialists. Essentially, the APTL straightforwardly suggested that a union of interest existed between labor and capital on the tariff issue, which dictated a common national effort across class boundaries to further American prosperity. In this way of thinking, protectionists offered the tariff as a cure for Gilded Age social tensions and labor conflicts, as well as an antidote for unions, which, given the supposed harmony of interests between capital and labor, would eventually become obsolete if only the tariff was recognized as the main line of economic controversy and be kept sufficiently high. Also, the APTL’s agitation mixed typical protectionist Anglophobia with late nineteenth-century, anti-immigrant stereotypes in an attempt to appeal to industrial workers’ nativist sentiment.
As far as the evidence shows, American workers only rarely reciprocated this kind of elite protectionist effort to form a national alliance between capital and labor under the banner of tariff protectionism. The wage argument and protectionist policies saw sizable support from a specific segment of the labor force, mainly industrial workers from protected industries. It is, however, doubtful whether this support can be interpreted as the effect of protectionists’ agitation efforts. Rather, it seems to have been mainly the result of labor protectionists economic self-interest. Other segments of the working population rejected protectionism in equally strong terms. They, too, were certainly not susceptible to protectionist agitation. If anything, elite protectionist agitation might have had a reverse effect as it raised suspicion among labor representatives who, for the most part, rejected the idea of a union of interests and harmonious cooperation with capitalists. The national union of interests, a harmonious cooperation between industrialists and laborers, did not materialize. It remained what the context of Gilded Age labor struggles had always suggested it was: perhaps a useful agitation tool but, ultimately, an idealized fiction.
Acknowledgments
This article originated as a paper presented at the 2023 Journal of the History of Ideas Blog’s Graduate Student Symposium. I wish to thank the organizers and participants of the Symposium. In addition, I extend my gratitude to Lisa Damminger, Sophia Gröschel, Lisa Hellriegel, Hanna Janatka, Fabienne Müller, David Noack, Frederik Risse, Cornelius Torp, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. This article is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841-SFB 1342.
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