"Rum, Romanism and Rebellion"

Protective Tariffs


Today's selection -- from The Wealth of a Nation by C. Donald Johnson. In the 1880s, the United States had high tariffs and a huge budget surplus. President Grover Cleveland had great difficulty with legislation designed to reduce tariffs, since they were deemed to protect "the American workingman from the conditions of 'pauper labor' of Europe":

"There is little evidence that Grover Cleveland had given much attention to the issue of trade policy before his election to the presidency, an event that ended twenty-four years in the wilderness for Democrats since James Buchanan had left the executive mansion in 1860. Before he was nominated to run for president, Cleveland's political career was hardly three years old; he had been mayor of Buffalo in 1882 and governor of New York during the years 1883-84. In his short tenure he had acquired a reputation for integrity and fighting graft, which contrasted nicely with Blaine's reputation for cor­ruption. In the particularly nasty 1884 campaign, however, the Republicans revealed that Cleveland, a bachelor, had fathered an illegitimate child ten years earlier. Paternity of the child was actually questionable, but Cleveland candidly and without hesitation accepted responsibility. With issues like this personal attack -- which, while embarrassing, had the unintended con­sequence of enhancing Cleveland's reputation for honesty -- and Blaine's 'Burn this letter' incident dominating the campaign, tariff policies took a backseat.

Cleveland portrayed as a tariff reformer

"Although he was cautious and gradual in his approach, the new pres­ident soon picked up on the tariff issue, taking the side of the moderate reformers. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1885, he reflected his fiscally conservative bias when he justified proposals for reduc­tions in customs duties with the simple observation that 'our revenues are in excess of the actual needs of an economical administration of the Government'. In an effort to avoid a philosophical and political quagmire, Cleveland studiously added, 'The question of free trade is not involved, nor is there now any occasion for the general discussion of the wisdom or expediency of a protective system.' Throwing a bone to the protectionists, he further cautioned that the reductions should be done 'in such manner as to protect the interests of American labor .... Its stability and proper remuneration furnish the most justifiable pretext for a protective policy.' His only directive regarding the selection of tariffs to reduce was to focus on duties 'upon the necessaries of life' so as to 'lessen the cost of living in every family of the land and release to the people in every humble home a larger measure of the rewards of frugal Industry.'

"Modest as it was, Cleveland's proposal did not win approval in Congress.

"Although Democrats controlled the House with a comfortable majority, ­protectionist Republicans still maintained a slim rule over the Senate -- a sizable faction of Democratic votes could be expected to line up against any tariff reduction. Hence, when the Ways and Means Committee produced a bill containing moderate tariff reductions supported by the president, the Republicans with the aid of thirty-five Democratic dissenters were able to defeat a motion to bring it to the House floor for a vote.

"In the months that followed, Cleveland became more determined to address the growing surplus in the government treasury and more infuri­ated with the inequity of protectionist tariff policies. In his second annual address to Congress in December 1886, he renewed his tariff reduction pro­posal using language that contrasted sharply with that in his soft-pedaling proposal the year before. In a section much longer than in his previous address, he wrote passionately about the plight of the American farmers, who were 'forced to pay excessive and needless taxation, while their prod­ucts struggle in foreign markets.' Assuming an Adam Smith perspective and a Jacksonian posture, he pointed out the 'abnormal and exceptional business profits, which ... increases without corresponding benefit to the people at large the vast accumulation of a few among our citizens, whose fortune, rivaling the wealth of the most favored in antidemocratic nations, are not the natural growth of a steady, plain, and industrious republic.' Despite its more passionate approach, the president's message again failed to move Congress, which adjourned in March the following year without taking a vote on a tariff bill.

"Adding to the president's frustrations, Republican protectionist forces, led by the secretary of the American Tin Plate Association, had trooped into the Illinois district of Cleveland's tariff reform workhorse, Ways and Means chairman William R. Morrison, and marshaled his defeat. A num­ber of other tariff reform candidates lost in the 1886 midterm elections, reducing the Democratic majority in the House to a narrow margin.

"Despite bleak odds and his poor track record, Cleveland resolved over the summer and fall of 1887 to force the tariff reform issue in a bold and unprecedented fashion that would define his presidency. Taking few into his confidence, the president decided to devote his entire annual message to Congress in 1887 to the tariff issue. Following the tradition of his pre­decessors, his previous annual messages had been long, ponderous briefs, covering a multitude of 'State of the Union' issues on domestic and foreign affairs with a variety of legislative recommendations scattered throughout. This year the input his cabinet secretaries provided on the sundry matters of concern within their departments was a wasted effort. Cleveland wanted no distractions from other public issues. He intended to present the tariff issue in a manner that would shock the conscience of the public, if not Congress; With only a few edits from close advisers, the president was solely respon­sible for the message. In making a methodical and straightforward case against protective tariffs, he wrote the address in the fashion of a lawyer's appeal, though he spiced it with a fair share of emotive, political rhetoric.

"Cleveland began by laying out the central problem of the government's growing surplus, which he said was turning the public treasury into 'a hoarding place for money needlessly withdrawn from trade and the peo­ple's use, thus crippling our national energies ... and inviting schemes of public plunder.' He charged that collecting more revenue from citizens than was necessary to maintain the government was a 'perversion' tanta­mount to 'indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fair­ness and justice.' Reviewing the current fiscal picture in some detail, he warned that the surplus would almost triple in the next year with no pro­ductive use for the surplus funds. All of the government's bonded indebt­edness that could be paid off without premium or penalty had already been retired. Cleveland was opposed to 'unnecessary and extravagant appropria­tions'; he also objected to depositing US Treasury money in private banks because it established 'too close a relationship between the operations of the Government Treasury and the business of the country ... thus foster­ing an unnatural reliance in private business upon public funds.' Predicting disaster if Congress continued its inaction, the president said 'the gravity of our financial situation' demanded a remedy and turned his attention to the cause of the problem.

"The system of taxation that had caused this 'needless surplus' consisted of import duties and internal excise taxes levied on tobacco and alcoholic beverages. Since the latter were not in Cleveland's view, 'strictly speaking, necessaries.' consumers of alcohol and tobacco had no just complaint as to this tax. On the other hand, the tariff laws, which he called 'the vicious, inequitable, and illogical source of unnecessary taxation,' should be revised and amended 'at once.' These laws, he contended, raised the price not only of all imported goods but all domestic goods that were protected by tariffs as well, because domestic producers increased their prices to correspond with the protective duty. Cleveland said he was not proposing to eliminate protection of American labor or manufacturing interests but only the pro­tection of 'immense profits instead of moderately profitable returns.' In the midst of the United States' centennial celebration, he scorned those who justified this unreasonable tariff scheme under Alexander Hamilton's infant industry argument, condemning domestic manufacturers 'still needing the highest and greatest degree of favor and fostering care that can be wrung from Federal legislation' after 100 years.

"As to the protectionist argument that high tariffs shielded the American workingman from the conditions of 'pauper labor' of Europe, Cleveland observed that of the approximately 17.4 million workers engaged in all American industries only 2.6 million were employed in manufacturing industries that benefited from high tariffs. He was careful not to suggest that the protected workers -- who were in the minority -- should forgo the benefit that high tariffs might have on their wages in order to lower prices for the majority of wage earners. But, with a degree of understatement, Cleveland noted that the protected workers 'will not overlook that they are consumers with the rest.'

"He then turned to the effect of the tariff on the farmers, 'who manu­facture nothing, but who pay the increased price which the tariff imposes upon every agricultural implement, upon all he wears, and upon all he uses and owns.' Addressing the wool tariff issue, Cleveland said that the farmer who had no sheep was forced 'to pay a tribute to his fellow-farmer as well as to the manufacturer and merchant.' He said the benefit even to sheep farmers was 'illusory' because most sheep were raised by farmers in small flocks of twenty-five to fifty sheep, which at then current prices would allow a tariff profit of only $18 to $36, depending upon the number in their flock. When the wool was manufactured into cloth, he observed, a further sum was added to the price to benefit the tariff-protected woolen product manufacturer. By the time the sheep farmer purchased his own woolen goods for his family for the winter, he had lost his tariff profit through the cost of his new merchandise. Considering the small number of sheep farmers in proportion to the rest of the country's population and the illusory value of the wool tariff even to them, the president concluded that 'it constitutes a tax which with relentless grasp is fastened upon the clothing of every man, woman, and child in the land' and should be removed or reduced.

"Taking up a theme addressed by Adam Smith a century earlier, Cleveland attacked monopolies, which had come of age in America's Gilded Age in the form of trusts." 

The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America
 
author: C. Donald Johnson  
title: The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America  
publisher: Oxford University Press  
date: 2018  
page(s): 109-113

The Atlantic: Floundering In A Vast Sea Of Ignorance

Astronomers Were Not Expecting This

Newly discovered galaxies are scrambling our story of the universe.

A James Webb Space Telescope picture of a nearby galaxy spiral and sparkling along with many smaller galaxies in the dark background
ESA / NASA / CSA
MARCH 4, 2023
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Humans have long found meaning in the stars, but only recently have we begun to understand whole clusters of them—galaxies, way out in the depths of space. A few nearby galaxies, such as Andromeda, have always been visible to the naked eye as a dusky smear in the night sky. Other shimmery structures became known to us after the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, along with a debate about their nature: Were they clouds of cosmic dust within our Milky Way, or “island universes” of their own?

Not until the 1920s did humanity identify these glowing clouds as galaxies, when the astronomer Edwin Hubble (relying on the work of a lesser known astronomer, Henrietta Leavitt) found that some stars were too far away to belong to the Milky Way. And only in the mid-1990s, when a space telescope named for Hubble peeked farther into the universe than ever before, did we find the thousands of galaxies shimmering across the universe—island after island in a vast cosmic sea.

After Hubble, astronomers felt pretty confident that they understood galaxies and how nature makes them. But some new, startling developments have recently popped up, courtesy of a space telescope far more powerful than Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope, in full operation since last summer, has shown that galaxies formed much sooner after the Big Bang than scientists previously thought—and that some of them are unexpectedly large, absolutely brimming with stars. The findings have thrown scientists into a new reality in which their existing theories no longer apply.

Everyone in the astronomy community knew that the Webb telescope was going to be revolutionary. “And we had a very clear list of things that we thought Webb would totally blow our socks off about,” Joel Leja, an astronomer at Penn State University, told me. But the discovery of cosmically chunky galaxies where there shouldn’t be any? “This was nowhere on it. No one was looking for this.”

Instruments like Hubble and Webb are something like time machines. When the observatories look out into the depths, they’re basking in starlight that left its source eons ago, and has been traveling across the universe toward us ever since; in other words, to understand the cosmic beginning, astronomers must look for the most distant galaxies. Before Webb, scientists believed that those early, distant galaxies emerged at a leisurely pace. The first stars formed when clouds of hydrogen gas collapsed in on themselves and ignited. Then gravity drew the ancient orbs together into galaxies.

All of this drawing together of disparate matter into massive cosmic neighborhoods was assumed to have taken at least 1 billion years. Sure, the most distant galaxy that Hubble ever spotted was unexpectedly bright for the cosmic conditions of the time, indicating a larger collection of stars than should have been possible. But astronomers didn’t think too much of it then. They expected that Webb, with its ultra-powerful infrared vision, would uncover the starter galaxies that they anticipated, and that Hubble couldn’t see.







Ha! said the shiny new telescope. In Webb’s first weeks, as astronomers raced to find the most distant galaxies ever detected, they wondered whether the data were actually wrong. The ancient galaxies were just too big and bright. A recalibration of Webb’s instruments soon showed that some measurements were off, making some galaxies appear more distant than they actually were, and some claims were revised. But the big-picture findings stuck. The early universe was, somehow, bold and brash and remarkably luminous. “The objects we’re finding are as massive or larger than the Milky Way, which is astounding,” said Leja, who co-published a paper last week that identified six enormous galaxies that existed just 500 million to 700 million years after the Big Bang. One of these galaxies may have a mass 100 billion times that of our sun. Our own galaxy similarly contains many billions of stars, but it has had 13 billion years to reach its size.

For a brief moment, this new reality seemed to threaten astronomers’ fundamental understanding of the entire cosmos. If the starting point looked like that, could the standard model of cosmology—our strongest theory about the origins and composition of the universe, the one that didn’t account for what Webb found—be wrong? But astronomers now believe that the theory can accommodate the new telescope’s surprises. Recent computer simulations guided by the standard model have shown that the universe could indeed have created some of the galaxies that Webb has found. “While, on the face of it, the data don’t seem consistent with cosmological models, I think what we’re going to find is it’s not cosmology that’s the problem, but really what we understand about how galaxies formed,” Leja said.

The possible explanations for how astronomers got it wrong are plentiful. Perhaps early stars formed far more efficiently than we thought, through mechanisms that scientists hadn’t considered before. Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas who studies galaxy evolution, wonders whether cosmic dust in these galaxies could be playing tricks on Webb, making stars appear older than they really are—and maybe cosmic dust was just different back then. Ivo Labbé, an astronomer at Swinburne University of Technology, suspects that black holes could play a role: They are among the most luminous objects in the universe when they’re feeding on cosmic matter, which glows as it gets sucked in. “If you dump a lot of gas into a black hole, it will start to outshine the entire galaxy,” Labbé told me. Such black holes could make early galaxies appear brighter, more star-filled. But none of these possibilities will undo the fact that the first island universes are not what we expected. Even accounting for some weird new phenomena, “everything’s too big, and it’s too big, too soon,” Kirkpatrick told me.

Investigating these questions will require more Webb observations, particularly the kind that yield more detailed measurements of starlight, known as spectroscopy. Astronomers need more to confirm that the most unusual galaxies they’ve found are the real deal. And if they really are as old and big as they seem, understanding their composition will help astronomers suss out the conditions in which they formed. Researchers are in the thick of it now, with fresh spectroscopic data expected to come this spring. The effort verges on soul-searching. Primordial starlight has never been so in demand, and astronomers and theorists—those who observe cosmic wonders, and those who explain them, respectively—don’t know exactly what they’ll find once they’re finished. “It’s probably going to be something like five years until we’ve totally settled into our new universe that we’ve gotten from JWST,” Wren Suess, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford, told me.

In one sense, these new discoveries have injected drama, even anxiety, into a field that was quite stable. “It’s incredible how the universe is just so much weirder than we thought it was,” Erica Nelson, an astronomer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me. But in another sense, it’s just fun. When I asked Kirkpatrick whether she feels stressed about the uncertainty her profession is navigating, she cackled with glee. “It’s the beginning of the universe!” she said. “It’s not going to affect my life, so it’s really fun to think about this kind of stuff.”

As I’ve talked with astronomers about what Webb has found so far, one word keeps coming up: shouldn’t. Galaxies shouldn’t be this way; the cosmic dawn shouldn’t be that way. I find these shouldn’ts delightful. They hint at the well-intentioned hubris of humans, especially the most curious ones, those who wish to determine exactly how something works and why. But of course the universe says, speaking to us by way of a giant telescope floating a million miles from Earth, This is how it is. This is, apparently, how it has always been. We’re just discovering the wonder of it now.

Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.