Historians trace the origins of protectionist thought to the pre-Civil War period during which time the U.S. transitioned into a more industrial capitalist society. Protectionists presented tariffs as the essential policy to quicken the development of manufactures as well as a remedy to the social ills that afflicted the emerging industrial working class. Proponents argued that tariffs would shield American workers from the socially deleterious consequences of the industrial revolution that were already observable by the early 19th century in Europe, especially in Britain.
Imagining tariffs as a paternalistic state response to the legitimate concerns of workers, protectionists ensured that industrialization in the U.S. would not follow the same declining course as it had in Britain. Instead, protectionists argued that tariffs would shelter American workers from the competition of cheap foreign labor by propping up domestic wages and creating the opportunities for social-economic mobility so necessary to what became known as the American Dream.
But by the end of the 19th century, the industrial social-economic order that tariffs helped foster were quite different from what earlier protectionists had promised. To help distinguish promises from reality, we should remember the work of the thinker who shaped lasting beliefs about tariffs in the U.S.: Henry Carey.
Although the 1791 publication of Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures initiated America’s support for tariffs, it was Henry Carey (1793-1879), a Philadelphia printer who later became President Abraham Lincoln’s economic adviser, who united what had been a set of disparate ideas about trade policy into an all-encompassing ideology. Carey focused various strains of American economic, political, social and cultural values towards a single principle: protectionism. And in the process, Carey became America’s most influential economic thinker.
Much like how Trump has made China a key bogeyman in his trade war, protectionists like Carey linked tariffs to a patriotic, nationalistic disdain for Britain. American Anglophobia was palpable years after the American Revolution, swelling during the War of 1812, and aggravated again by the Panic of 1819, America’s first major economic crisis. Modern economists attribute the Panic to the business cycle and reckless monetary expansionism. But protectionists of the era argued that it was a conspiracy orchestrated by British merchants to “dump” cheap English wares at American ports, crushing domestic “infant industry” and impoverishing American workers. Some argued that Britain waged an economic “war of extermination” against the U.S.