In theory, tariffs protected developing industries in their vulnerable early stages. In practice, nest-feathering was rampant. As Irwin explains, the corruption could be hard for even staunch protectionists to stomach. An 1882 commission, packed with seemingly steadfast tariff men, uncovered duties that were so excessive as to “discredit our whole national economic system and furnish plausible arguments for its complete subversion.” Even McKinley’s right-hand man, Mark Hanna, infuriated by shoddy U.S. goods, railed against manufacturers “squatting behind the tariff like a lot of God damn rabbitts.”
As the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, McKinley oversaw a tariff bill in 1890 that covered nearly four thousand items and raised already high rates. But why? Although Britain was the hub of the international system, the United States by then had the world’s largest economy. Tariffs might have served a purpose in sheltering infant industries early in the century, but circumstances had changed. “We lead all nations in manufacturing,” McKinley boasted. Why did U.S. industries still need shielding? Irwin finds that Gilded Age tariffs did little to enrich the country as a whole. They are better thought of as redistributing resources from farming states to manufacturing ones.
Meanwhile, Irwin explains, U.S. trade policy wreaked havoc abroad. An adjustment to the sugar tariff in McKinley’s 1890 bill destabilized Hawaii and led planters and businessmen there to overthrow the Indigenous monarchy. (They hoped to solve their tariff-related problems by having the United States annex the archipelago.) Another adjustment to sugar rates shortly thereafter threw Spain’s colony of Cuba into a tailspin, spurring an anti-colonial war.
The McKinley tariffs, meanwhile, hit Canada so hard that its Prime Minister, John Macdonald, perceived a “deliberate conspiracy” to “force Canada into the American union.” This was not mere paranoia, the historian Marc-William Palen has shown. The U.S. Secretary of State expressed his hope to President Harrison that McKinley’s tariffs would have just this effect.
Tariffs did lead to colonization, just not of Canada. The depression of the eighteen-nineties, exacerbated by McKinley’s tariffs, stirred American support for taking colonies in order to right the economy. The tariff-induced turmoil in Cuba and Hawaii seemed to invite this. In 1898, during McKinley’s Presidency, the United States joined forces with anti-colonial rebels in the Spanish Empire, defeated Spanish forces, and then went on an imperial spree. The U.S. annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the eastern Samoan islands, occupied Cuba, and even seized Spain’s large Asian colony, the Philippines. Filipino nationalists sought to prevent the Stars and Stripes from flying over Manila, and the resulting war left hundreds of thousands dead. Still, McKinley reflected, declining to take the Philippines would have made the United States “the laughing stock of the world.”