I was recently reading "Essays Designed to Elucidate The Science of Political Economy, While Serving To Explain and Defend The Policy of Protection to Home Industry, As a System of National Cooperation For True Elevation of Labor" by Horace Greeley (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co. 1870). In one curious passage, Greeley advocates protection for, of all things, an American tea industry:
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Understand, once for all, that I do not propose a contravention of the laws of Nature, nor of any of them. If my countrymen can only grow coffee or allspice, caoutchouc or cocoa, in hot-houses, at many times the cost (in labor) of its production in tropical regions, then I would nowise encourage its growth among us at all. The free trade badinage about protecting the growth of pineapples in Minnesota, or of arrow-root in Maine, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, &c., &c., is simple buffoonery in evasion of the true issue. I quite comprehend that even international and trans-oceanic commerce has a beneficent function, -that of diffusing among the inhabitants of all zones and countries those natural products of each to which the soil or climate of another is ungenial, so that all may enjoy, in a measure, the blessings divinely bestowed upon each. And, so far from wishing to obstruct or impede such diffusion, I acquiesce most reluctantly in the imposition or retention of any duty or tax whatever on those products of other climes which cannot, because of natural impediments, be successfully grown or rivalled on our own soil. Show me that Nature has interposed a serious barrier to the growth or production of any staple in my country, and I will strenuously insist that no duty be imposed on transportation of that product unless for revenue, and that this shall be removed so soon as the treasury can spare its proceeds.
Now let me show, without reference to existing interests, wherein and why I would apply the principle of Protection:-
Tea is grown almost wholly in China, Japan, India; and, wherever grown at all, in latitudes and climates whereof parallels are found in our own country. And we have already ascertained by experiment that the tea-plant germinates, flourishes, and matures, in upper South Carolina and in East Tennessee. It should have been tested long since at a hundred different points throughout the Union; but there is no room for rational doubt that as large an area of this republic as of China will produce tea abundantly and continuously, under proper cultivation.
Now it is inevitable that, so long as the tea drank by our people shall continue to be grown in China and Japan, the consumers here will pay (quite apart from and above any tax or duty imposed on its importation by our government) three to six times as much for their tea as the Chinese growers receive for it. The old hyson, for which our drinkers pay In the average a full dollar (specie) per pound, over and above the tax which goes into our Federal treasury, has doubtless been bought of the grower for twenty to thirty cents per pound; the residue of its cost to the consumer (less tax) being made up of the profits and charges of the various traders and forwarders, agents and brokers, through whose hands it has passed on its way from the interior of China to the interior of the United States.
I want to save the millions on millions thus annually expended, - I believe uselessly, wastefully expended, I want to divide them between the grower and the consumer of tea, or to secure them to him where the same person shall be both grower and consumer. I believe that to pursue this policy is to increase the reward of Labor generally, and especially of American Labor. Instead of one thousand persons growing tea in China, one thousand more mining gold and silver in Nevada to pay for that tea, and other three or four thousands employed as merchants, factors, shippers, navigators, canal-boat men, brokers, &c, &c., &c., in transmitting the tea from the grower to the consumer, exchanging his product for the gold and silver wherewith the Chinese are mainly paid, and forwarding that gold and silver (or some equivalent) to the tea-grower, I would have two thousands of our own people growing tea, two thousands more producing the various staples and fabrics that our tea-growers would require in exchange for it, reduce the whole number required to effect the necessary exchanges to one thousand, and save the gold and silver to reinforce our now dishonored Currency and payoff our enormous Debt.
Now I protest that, in maturing and avowing this conviction, I have been nowise impelled by contempt or hate of the Chinese, - of their paganism, their polygamy, their pigtails, or their reputed fondness for stewed puppies. Whatever there may be of evil or of good in their peculiarities lies entirely outside of the range of my economic conceptions and impulses. Nor have I been swayed by any special addiction to tea, or to tea-growing, nor by any desire to enrich present or prospective tea-growers, much less to endow them with a monopoly, gainful to them but baleful to all others. I have no peculiar affection for them, - no desire to promote their interest otherwise than as it is identified with I the general good. I perceive and admit the possibility that certain persons might, by an early importation of tea-seed, or by growing large quantities of tea-plants for sale in advance of most others, secure to themselves peculiar advantages; but this is an incident which I did not desire, and care not to obviate. I do not see how those persons can be justly reproached as monopolists, any more than the grower of a new American grape or seedling potato. And, if they should proceed to grow tea in advance of their neighbors, and should sell their early crops at exceptionally high prices, I should be rather inclined to rejoice over than deprecate their good fortune, because l am sure it would incite more and more to embark in American tea-growing, till the profit thereof should be reduced to an equation with that of other departments of our National Industry. Unless a regard for self-interest has been eliminated from human nature, and water has ceased to run down hill, this consequence of large profits accruing in a pursuit open to all is inevitable; and it is this that I seek by Protection to secure.
http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/mc000108.pdf
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OK, let's say that [handwave] Greeley is elected (and does not promptly die--we'll say that his death in OTL was hastened by his knowledge of how badly he had been beaten) and gets Congress to pass the "Tea Protection Act." Does tea cultivation flourish in the US?
According to http://www.foodhistory.com/foodnotes/leftovers/sctea.htm and http://www.sciway.net/tourism/tea-history.html the only successful tea growing in the US is in South Carolina, and even there, long-term commercially successful tea cultivation has been a rather recent development, and confined to one plantation, the Charleston Tea Plantation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_Tea_Plantation (Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_production_in_the_United_States does mention Dr. Charles Shepard's late nineteenth century South Carolina plantation, which seems to have been quite productive. "However, domestic shipping rates made selling his tea to major markets in the US difficult. These 'made it cheaper for Chicagoans, for example, to buy tea from China than from Carolina.'") But of course Greeley would say that this is precisely because we made the mistake of allowing all that Oriental competition. The success of Dr. Shepard's plantation in the late nineteenth century and of the Charleston Tea Plantation a century later would have been multiplied many times in other locations, he would argue, if we just put a sufficient tariff on foreign tea.
Of course I am not arguing that, even if possible, the encouraging of such an American tea industry is desirable. Writing more than a decade after Greeley, Henry George noted that Greeley did not seem to understand that "the interchange of commodities is governed by the comparative, not the absolute, cost of production": "tea, which Horace Greeley was fond of referring to as a production that might advantageously be naturalized in the United States by a heavy duty, could undoubtedly be produced in the United States at less cost of labor than in China, for in transportation to the seaboard, packing, etc., we could save upon Chinese methods. But there are other things, such as the mining of silver, the refining of oil, the weaving of cloth, the making of clocks and watches, as to which our advantage over the Chinese is enormously greater than in the growing of tea. Hence, by producing these things and exchanging them directly or indirectly for Chinese tea, in spite of the long carriage, more tea for the same labor than we could get by growing our own tea." http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPFT15.html
***
Understand, once for all, that I do not propose a contravention of the laws of Nature, nor of any of them. If my countrymen can only grow coffee or allspice, caoutchouc or cocoa, in hot-houses, at many times the cost (in labor) of its production in tropical regions, then I would nowise encourage its growth among us at all. The free trade badinage about protecting the growth of pineapples in Minnesota, or of arrow-root in Maine, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, &c., &c., is simple buffoonery in evasion of the true issue. I quite comprehend that even international and trans-oceanic commerce has a beneficent function, -that of diffusing among the inhabitants of all zones and countries those natural products of each to which the soil or climate of another is ungenial, so that all may enjoy, in a measure, the blessings divinely bestowed upon each. And, so far from wishing to obstruct or impede such diffusion, I acquiesce most reluctantly in the imposition or retention of any duty or tax whatever on those products of other climes which cannot, because of natural impediments, be successfully grown or rivalled on our own soil. Show me that Nature has interposed a serious barrier to the growth or production of any staple in my country, and I will strenuously insist that no duty be imposed on transportation of that product unless for revenue, and that this shall be removed so soon as the treasury can spare its proceeds.
Now let me show, without reference to existing interests, wherein and why I would apply the principle of Protection:-
Tea is grown almost wholly in China, Japan, India; and, wherever grown at all, in latitudes and climates whereof parallels are found in our own country. And we have already ascertained by experiment that the tea-plant germinates, flourishes, and matures, in upper South Carolina and in East Tennessee. It should have been tested long since at a hundred different points throughout the Union; but there is no room for rational doubt that as large an area of this republic as of China will produce tea abundantly and continuously, under proper cultivation.
Now it is inevitable that, so long as the tea drank by our people shall continue to be grown in China and Japan, the consumers here will pay (quite apart from and above any tax or duty imposed on its importation by our government) three to six times as much for their tea as the Chinese growers receive for it. The old hyson, for which our drinkers pay In the average a full dollar (specie) per pound, over and above the tax which goes into our Federal treasury, has doubtless been bought of the grower for twenty to thirty cents per pound; the residue of its cost to the consumer (less tax) being made up of the profits and charges of the various traders and forwarders, agents and brokers, through whose hands it has passed on its way from the interior of China to the interior of the United States.
I want to save the millions on millions thus annually expended, - I believe uselessly, wastefully expended, I want to divide them between the grower and the consumer of tea, or to secure them to him where the same person shall be both grower and consumer. I believe that to pursue this policy is to increase the reward of Labor generally, and especially of American Labor. Instead of one thousand persons growing tea in China, one thousand more mining gold and silver in Nevada to pay for that tea, and other three or four thousands employed as merchants, factors, shippers, navigators, canal-boat men, brokers, &c, &c., &c., in transmitting the tea from the grower to the consumer, exchanging his product for the gold and silver wherewith the Chinese are mainly paid, and forwarding that gold and silver (or some equivalent) to the tea-grower, I would have two thousands of our own people growing tea, two thousands more producing the various staples and fabrics that our tea-growers would require in exchange for it, reduce the whole number required to effect the necessary exchanges to one thousand, and save the gold and silver to reinforce our now dishonored Currency and payoff our enormous Debt.
Now I protest that, in maturing and avowing this conviction, I have been nowise impelled by contempt or hate of the Chinese, - of their paganism, their polygamy, their pigtails, or their reputed fondness for stewed puppies. Whatever there may be of evil or of good in their peculiarities lies entirely outside of the range of my economic conceptions and impulses. Nor have I been swayed by any special addiction to tea, or to tea-growing, nor by any desire to enrich present or prospective tea-growers, much less to endow them with a monopoly, gainful to them but baleful to all others. I have no peculiar affection for them, - no desire to promote their interest otherwise than as it is identified with I the general good. I perceive and admit the possibility that certain persons might, by an early importation of tea-seed, or by growing large quantities of tea-plants for sale in advance of most others, secure to themselves peculiar advantages; but this is an incident which I did not desire, and care not to obviate. I do not see how those persons can be justly reproached as monopolists, any more than the grower of a new American grape or seedling potato. And, if they should proceed to grow tea in advance of their neighbors, and should sell their early crops at exceptionally high prices, I should be rather inclined to rejoice over than deprecate their good fortune, because l am sure it would incite more and more to embark in American tea-growing, till the profit thereof should be reduced to an equation with that of other departments of our National Industry. Unless a regard for self-interest has been eliminated from human nature, and water has ceased to run down hill, this consequence of large profits accruing in a pursuit open to all is inevitable; and it is this that I seek by Protection to secure.
http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/mc000108.pdf
***
OK, let's say that [handwave] Greeley is elected (and does not promptly die--we'll say that his death in OTL was hastened by his knowledge of how badly he had been beaten) and gets Congress to pass the "Tea Protection Act." Does tea cultivation flourish in the US?
According to http://www.foodhistory.com/foodnotes/leftovers/sctea.htm and http://www.sciway.net/tourism/tea-history.html the only successful tea growing in the US is in South Carolina, and even there, long-term commercially successful tea cultivation has been a rather recent development, and confined to one plantation, the Charleston Tea Plantation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_Tea_Plantation (Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_production_in_the_United_States does mention Dr. Charles Shepard's late nineteenth century South Carolina plantation, which seems to have been quite productive. "However, domestic shipping rates made selling his tea to major markets in the US difficult. These 'made it cheaper for Chicagoans, for example, to buy tea from China than from Carolina.'") But of course Greeley would say that this is precisely because we made the mistake of allowing all that Oriental competition. The success of Dr. Shepard's plantation in the late nineteenth century and of the Charleston Tea Plantation a century later would have been multiplied many times in other locations, he would argue, if we just put a sufficient tariff on foreign tea.
Of course I am not arguing that, even if possible, the encouraging of such an American tea industry is desirable. Writing more than a decade after Greeley, Henry George noted that Greeley did not seem to understand that "the interchange of commodities is governed by the comparative, not the absolute, cost of production": "tea, which Horace Greeley was fond of referring to as a production that might advantageously be naturalized in the United States by a heavy duty, could undoubtedly be produced in the United States at less cost of labor than in China, for in transportation to the seaboard, packing, etc., we could save upon Chinese methods. But there are other things, such as the mining of silver, the refining of oil, the weaving of cloth, the making of clocks and watches, as to which our advantage over the Chinese is enormously greater than in the growing of tea. Hence, by producing these things and exchanging them directly or indirectly for Chinese tea, in spite of the long carriage, more tea for the same labor than we could get by growing our own tea." http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPFT15.html