“It Does Convert the Democrats! ‘Protective Tariff Facts Cartooned’ is a ‘little Protective Tariff bible’ that converts more Free-Traders to Protective Tariff than Billy Sunday converts sinners from the error of their ways.” With these remarks, the Republican committee of Bridgeport, Connecticut, promoted a collection of seventy cartoons that was used as an election campaign booklet in 1914 and 1916. In 1916, the publisher commented on the booklet’s alleged impact:
Front rank Republicans … believe that if this “little illustrated Protective Tariff bible” should be placed into the hands of every voter, it would effect an education in favor of Protective Tariff that would stick for a long time to the gray matter of every voter’s brain. If this little document does not convert a Free-Trader in favor of Protective Tariff, his little soul must be encased in a skull of Free-Trade prejudice so thick that a torpedo from a German submarine couldn’t pierce it.Footnote 1
The example of “Protective Tariff Facts Cartooned” illustrates the unwavering certainty with which protectionist agitators and campaigners of the early twentieth century looked to cartoons as media of political persuasion.
This was especially true for the American Protective Tariff League (APTL), a protectionist interest group that had originally produced many of the cartoons in the booklet.Footnote 2 The League was among the most influential propaganda organizations that attempted to muster public support for protectionist tariff policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founded in New York City in 1885, the APTL was a private organization solely dedicated to the popularization of protectionist ideology. With industrialists from protected industries as its main financiers, the organization acted as the popularist mouthpiece of an elite interest.Footnote 3 Privately funded, one-issue public pressure groups, like the APTL, were typical features of the United States’ political landscape around the turn of the century. As party ties slowly began to erode, a whole array of private pressure groups arose that tried to build coalitions around specific political demands and force political parties – in the APTL’s case, mostly the Republican Party – into a certain direction.Footnote 4
The League disseminated its protectionist message through many channels, including pamphlets, books, leaflets, newspapers, and public speakers. In their effort to educate Americans on the benefits of protectionism, the APTL also stood emblematically for the educational campaign style of the late nineteenth century, which was, as Michael McGerr observes, a transitional style of campaigning that sat between the partisan spectacle of nineteenth century campaigns and the candidate-centered advertising campaigns of the twentieth century.Footnote 5 In this educational effort, political cartoons were of special importance as the preeminent visual medium. Between 1894 and 1920, the APTL published over 1,800 cartoons in its weekly newspaper, American Economist, and secured these cartoons’ further circulation through reprints in local papers across the country.
Like the Republican campaigners quoted above, the APTL frequently stressed that the attractiveness of cartoons was due to their ability to simplify and condense, but also to explain the political and economic complexities of the tariff issue in a form appealing to potential voters. An 1898 cartoon collection, entitled “Protection Pictorially Presented,” declared that these cartoons “show, as nothing else could, the vigor and persistence with which the cause of Protection has been championed and it may be fairly surmised that they have had no trifling share in directing and influencing public thought upon the vital issue which they typify.”Footnote 6 In 1901, the APTL declared that “[a]rgument is never so effective as when presented pictorially. Protection has been made captivating to the popular mind by the aid of well-conceived and artistically executed drawing.”Footnote 7 In 1904, the League promoted another cartoon collection boasting that “[i]t exhibits in a unique way the pictorial possibilities of what is commonly regarded as a decidedly dry and unpicturesque subject.”Footnote 8
Even though the APTL frequently underlined the educational potential of political cartoons, these images rarely served to illustrate or explain the economic mechanisms behind tariff protectionism. As this article will demonstrate, the APTL’s cartoons rather emotionalized, dramatized, and personalized the tariff issue as their imagery offered a peculiar mix of peril and promise to convince readers of the benefits of tariff protectionism. The cartoons presented the tariff by way of fear-indulging metaphors of threat, danger, separation, defense, or protection, whereas they mainly illustrated protectionism as an abstract idea through metaphors of growth, productivity, abundance, and wealth, suggesting economic prosperity as the logical outcome of protectionist tariff policies. This mostly non-economic framing suggests that historians of American protectionism must broaden their approach to include these wider cultural and ideological entanglements, which underpinned the attractiveness of the protectionist argument, into their explanations of the durability of American protectionism into the twentieth century and beyond.
Between 1861 and 1934, the United States pursued, for the most part, a trade policy of highly restrictive import tariffs, which mostly shielded American manufacturing and heavy industries against foreign competitors. Despite this decades-long continuance of a highly protectionist tariff regime, protectionism was never unchallenged in the political arena. By the late 1880s, the tariff had developed into a clear-cut partisan issue with Republicans in favor of protectionism and Democrats calling for tariff reform. This confrontation was so fierce, persistently partisan, and tedious that the tariff debate came to be one of the quintessential political conflicts of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the wake of the growing competitiveness of many American industries, the split between tariff reformers and ultra-protectionist standpatters moved into the Republican camp in the early twentieth century but remained equally contentious. However, fierce opposition and brief interludes of reform attempts notwithstanding, tariff protectionism remained a defining feature of the American economy far into the twentieth century.Footnote 9
It was not just industrialists from protected industries or export-oriented merchants who were strongly invested in the tariff issue. The extraordinary intensity and persistence of the American tariff debate throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were also due to the political and economic relevance that many Americans ascribed to the issue. To many Americans, the tariff was more than an instrument of trade administration. As the tariff still provided the largest chunk of the federal budget into the twentieth century, the tariff debate was inherently entangled with discussions about the size, reach, and functions of the federal government. Moreover, most Americans regarded tariff policy as the central instrument with which the federal government could influence the trajectory of the United States’ general economic development. In this sense, tariff policy was commonly understood in this period as a form of industrial policy avant la lettre. In addition, the tariff debate was strongly connected to the rapid industrialization process, which the United States underwent in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Joanne Reitano argues, the American tariff debate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also functioned as a proxy debate, through which Americans discussed the far-reaching social, moral, political, and economic problems of the new industrial age.Footnote 10
By itself, however, the tariff was certainly not an easily exploitable campaign issue. It had to be embedded in a broader ideological setting and translated into a form that was accessible, understandable, interesting, and even exciting for ordinary Americans. Protectionist agitators, like the APTL, used cartoons as propagandistic tools that could move ordinary Americans to care deeply about the complex and rather esoteric tariff issue by creating associative connections to known and relatable themes from everyday life and popular culture. Therefore, the study of protectionist cartoons, like those produced by the APTL, can also indicate to historians some of the reasons why so many ordinary Americans were so heavily invested in the fierce and intense tariff debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In addition, cartoons were instrumental in framing the tariff debate as a dualistic choice between free trade and protectionism. The many long lists of goods and their corresponding rates of customs duties, which any act of import tariff legislation contained, rather offered a grayish range of many differentiated and commodity-specific possible tariff policies, not a black-or-white distinction between either free trade or protectionism. Cartoons provided contrast and simplification as an antidote to these economic and political complexities. They simplified and dramatized the issue and left little room for compromise and pragmatism. In this way, cartoon-style representations of the protectionist argument were fundamental in adjusting the tariff issue to the polarized political culture of the era.
In general, historians have paid great attention to the history of cartoons and stressed their political impact during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Footnote 11 Specifically, the Gilded Age has been identified by scholars as “a political cartoonist’s paradise” and the “Golden Age of American Political Cartoons.”Footnote 12 However, except for Harlem Makemson’s work on protectionist cartoon attacks on Grover Cleveland during the campaign of 1884, historians have neglected the ways in which the raging tariff debates of the era surfaced in the flourishing contemporary cartoon culture.Footnote 13 In addition, there is an ongoing theoretical debate among (art) historians and cultural scholars on the general functioning of cartoons as media of political communication, i.e., media specifically designed to transport a political message.Footnote 14 While it builds on some of these theorization attempts, this article is not intended as a contribution to that debate. Rather, it focuses on a specific historical case study to understand the intersection of the late nineteenth-century cartoon boom with one of the central political debates of the era. By highlighting recurring patterns of representation, this article seeks to scrutinize the way in which the tariff issue was presented in the American Economist’s cartoons to muster support for the decidedly protectionist viewpoint of the APTL.
As a condensed composition of drawn allusions, metaphors, and symbols, cartoons presuppose an intricate system of established cultural references shared by the artist and readers. As Martin Medhurst and Michael Desousa put it, “[c]artoons ‘work’ to the extent that readers share in the communal consciousness, the available means of cultural symbology, and are able to recognize that shared locus of meaning as expressed by the caricature.” Borrowing a term from classical rhetoric, which describes an argumentative conclusion with an unstated yet presupposed condition, they call this dynamic the “enthymematic nature” of cartoons.Footnote 15 Given this reliance on a collective visual vocabulary, the value of cartoons as historical sources can go beyond merely reflecting the artist’s views as it also “lies in what they reveal about the societies that produced, circulated, and consumed them.”Footnote 16 The “sheer repetition of visual cues gives insight into the shared visual literacies and cultural expectations of viewers.”Footnote 17 Therefore, patterns of visual communication within a large number of political cartoons, not individual cartoons, should be analyzed if the study of political cartoons is to allow an insight into more general notions underlying political thought. In the case of the protectionist cartoons at interest here, patterns of depiction that frequently recurred in pictorial representations of protectionism should therefore be understood as indicative of both the agitational aims conveyed through them and the cultural and political background of the readers and their expectations toward visual representations of protectionism.
In this way, the analysis of the cartoons of the American Economist promises to expand our understanding of turn-of-the-century American protectionism in two important ways: First, it can shed new light on the propagandistic strategies that well-financed agitators employed in the interest of protectionist industrialists. Their cartoons indicate how these professional protectionists thought about the tariff issue and, most importantly, how they wanted Americans to think about it. Secondly, these cartoons are, at the same time, reflective of at least some underlying assumptions that shaped the way in which many ordinary Americans thought about and imagined protectionism.
It is, however, difficult to demonstrate patterns of recurring metaphors, symbols, and tropes in a large number of cartoons over a long period within the scope of a journal article. Therefore, this article’s analysis must be confined in two respects. First, as the analysis is focused on patterns of representation, most of the many cartoons considered are not analyzed in great detail. Rather, eight individual cartoons, which stand as representative of a specific metaphor, trope, or symbol, are included in the article and analyzed in greater detail and their specific historical context. To indicate their representativeness for a whole pattern of depiction, examples of further cartoons, which use the same visual vocabulary, are given in the notes. The article focuses on broader, generalizable ideas about the tariff issue and on the representation of these ideas within the cartoons considered. No cartoon can be reduced to a single message or metaphor, and every individual cartoon can be regarded as a multifaceted comment on its contemporary political moment. However, as this article aims to uncover the persistence of certain, especially formative patterns of representations that were used to transmit the protectionist argument, all other symbolisms and political references are only considered insofar as they relate to the tariff issue. In addition, cartoons that deal with highly specific political issues – for example, a tariff rate on a certain commodity or a minor political event – are mostly left out of the analysis.
Second, the analysis includes only cartoons that were published between 1894 and 1909. In 1894, the APTL began to regularly print cartoons. Even though the publication of APTL cartoons continued until 1920, the period that this article investigates is restricted to an earlier time frame. Ranging from Grover Cleveland’s second presidency to the subsequent presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and the beginning of William Howard Taft’s term in office, the period between 1894 and 1909 arguably encompasses the high point of the era’s tariff discussions. First, the nation went from the moderate reform of the 1894 Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff to the ultra-protectionist rates of the 1897 Republican Dingley Tariff. In the early twentieth century, then, the rift between ultra-protectionist standpatters and reform-minded insurgents caused considerable uproar within the Republican Party. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, signed into law by Taft in August 1909, represented a compromise between those factions and set a preliminary end point to the intra-Republican tariff debate. It is also a fitting limitation to this article’s analysis.
Reaching the Masses: The American Economist and the Distribution of Its Cartoons
To understand the political impact that the APTL’s cartoons could have, the means of their (technical) reproduction and distribution across the nation must first be considered. This reproduction system was, in turn, inherently tied to the rapid technical and stylistic developments of late nineteenth-century American cartoon culture. Weekly illustrated magazines had been the wellspring of the late nineteenth-century cartoon boom in the United States. Soon, specialized cartoon and satire magazines emerged. Puck, founded in 1876, and Judge, founded in 1881, were the two most iconic American cartoon magazines of the era.Footnote 18 Joseph Keppler, the founder of Puck, superseded Thomas Nast, the most influential American cartoonist of the Reconstruction era, and established the format of the weekly sixteen-page cartoon magazine. Its highlights were the three chromolithographic color cartoons: one on the cover, another on the back, and the crowning jewel of each issue: the two-page centerfold stretching over twenty by thirteen inches. Its main rival, Judge, was an exact copy of Puck regarding format and style but a passionate antagonist in its political orientation: Puck leaned Democratic, whereas Judge offered a Republican alternative.Footnote 19 Their rivalry also extended into the tariff debate: Judge continuously championed protectionist policies against Puck’s tariff reform advocacy.Footnote 20
In the late nineteenth century, improvements in printing techniques precipitated the transition from lithographic reproduction to photoengraving. This drastically shortened printing times and enabled cartoons to become a regular feature of daily newspapers. Pioneered by papers like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, most major dailies began publishing cartoons in the 1890s.Footnote 21 This technical development also had tremendous implications for the drawing style of the cartoons and, consequently, readers’ viewing habits. Cartoonists were left with only a day of production time, whereas newspaper readers spent considerably less time looking at the cartoon, expecting to understand it at first glance. Consequently, the daily editorial cartoon developed a crisp, reduced, and heavily symbolistic style. The trenchant and less-detailed black-and-white drawings placed within the editorial pages of daily newspapers were markedly different from the colorful, detailed, and meticulously arranged panoramic opulence of magazines like Puck and Judge. Footnote 22 The transition to photoengraving also allowed for a much wider circulation of individual cartoons. The simultaneous nationalization of the American public, in turn, led to an increasing consolidation of a shared visual vocabulary through the frequent repetition of especially characteristic enthymematic references across different newspapers.
The cartoons of the American Economist have to be understood in this context. The American Economist was the official organ of the APTL. The first issue appeared in January 1889 as a successor to the earlier Tariff League Bulletin. Weekly publication continued with only minor interruptions until July 1926. Even though it was designed as a classical newspaper with usually sixteen pages per issue, each with three columns of text, the American Economist reported exclusively on trade and tariff matters in addition to announcements about the APTL’s activities. The political commentary was highly partisan, unyieldingly protectionist, and often harsh and sarcastic when it confronted political opponents. T. Z. Cowles, a Civil War veteran who had climbed the career ladder of a typical Midwestern newspaperman, was the chief editor from 1897 to 1918 (Figure 1).Footnote 23 He worked at the APTL’s headquarters in New York City, often in close cooperation with Wilbur F. Wakeman, the APTL’s general secretary who was also in charge of the League’s press services (Figure 2). Since the American Economist never published circulation numbers, estimations on the reach of the paper remain notoriously imprecise. In 1903, a report gave a circulation of roughly 14,000, including about 6,000 newspaper exchanges. In the same report, the APTL claimed to reach 24 million weekly readers with all its material combined.Footnote 24 In 1900, the American Economist claimed to reach 6 million additional readers every week through auxiliary publishers.Footnote 25
Figure 1. T. Z. Cowles in the APTL’s editorial department. American Economist, April 21, 1916.
Figure 2. APTL general secretary Wilbur F. Wakeman in his office with portraits of McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft; an illustrated APTL poster on the wall; and a sculpture of the Republican elephant on the mantelpiece. American Economist, May 26, 1916.
Between spring 1894 and spring 1920, the American Economist published a total of 1,883 cartoons, 1,368 of them between 1894 and 1909.Footnote 26 The cartoons, in combination with their typical one-line captions, can be understood as a self-contained element of editorial commenting. This form of image-text combination was characteristic of contemporary editorial newspaper cartoons and, importantly, ensured the possibility of reproducing the cartoons in different contexts.Footnote 27 The League also printed its cartoons on posters and postcards.Footnote 28 The APTL hired regular cartoonists to supply the American Economist on a weekly basis. Usually, a single artist produced the bulk of cartoons for a longer period.Footnote 29 Occasionally, the American Economist also reprinted cartoons from other papers or acknowledged that a cartoon was actually an adaptation of a cartoon published elsewhere.Footnote 30 Information on the APTL’s regular cartoonists is scarce. Only two of them gained a somewhat more prominent status later in life: Charles Nelan and Quincy Scott.Footnote 31 Given the unambiguous position of the American Economist, however, any of these artists must have been – or at least drawn like – what the American Economist characterized Quincy Scott as: “an earnest Protectionist.”Footnote 32
Even if its decisively protectionist stance mirrored Judge politically, the American Economist’s cartoons were stylistically in line with contemporary editorial newspaper cartoons and, like other APTL material, they were also specifically created for reproduction in other newspapers. Small local (Republican-leaning) newspapers and their editors were a critical junction point for this circulation. While the full-fledged newspaper partisanship of earlier periods began to vanish in the late nineteenth century, many papers, especially smaller ones in rural areas, still openly favored one of the two major parties.Footnote 33 As these papers usually commanded only limited resources, they depended on outside assistance to fill their pages. The main way in which the League made use of this predicament was so-called newspaper exchanges, a common practice in American journalism throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 34 The APTL mailed copies of the American Economist to over 5,000 editors across the country every week.Footnote 35 These editors could then integrate complete texts, fragments, talking points, facts, or figures into their papers.Footnote 36
Press associations, also called newspaper syndicates or auxiliary publishers, represented a second channel for the distribution of protectionist material. These for-profit organizations were especially important for the dissemination of cartoons, which could be circulated but not reproduced through the exchange system. The syndicates supplied local newspapers with so-called patent insides, (partially) preprinted pages to be included in local newspapers, ready prints, also called boilerplates, (partially) preformed printing plates to be used in situ by local editors, and electrotyped or stereotyped plate copies of cartoons and graphics.Footnote 37 The supplementation of local newspapers through these associations was a common editorial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and offered great opportunities for organizations like the APTL to circulate their material.Footnote 38 In 1894, for example, APTL material, including cartoons, could be ordered at low rates from local distribution points of all major newspaper syndicates: the Chicago Newspaper Union, the Western Newspaper Union, and the A. N. Kellogg Newspaper Corporation, or the American Press Association. The latter alone upheld local distribution offices in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, New York City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Paul. In 1903, for example, the APTL supplied auxiliary publishers with two columns of protectionist editorials and several cartoons every Monday. A whole page of six columns was sent out every third Monday.Footnote 39
As a third channel of cartoon circulation, the APTL also mailed plate copies directly to local editors. To facilitate this practice, the APTL published special supplements to the American Economist in 1898, 1901, and 1904, which contained all APTL cartoons from the three years prior – a triennial “aggregation of the pictorial aspects of Protection.”Footnote 40 The supplements basically functioned as order catalogues. Every cartoon was equipped with an identification number that enabled editors to order printing plates priced at four cents per square inch.Footnote 41 Apparently, the demand for plate copies was so great that the League could frequently not handle these individual orders and referred editors to auxiliary publishers.Footnote 42
Since the APTL did not publish information on the reproduction of its cartoons in other papers, the exact size and reach of its distribution system are impossible to detect. Via the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper database, it is possible to trace at least some APTL cartoons that made their way into local newspapers across the country, even if the significance of the numbers found is hard to ascertain.Footnote 43 Various newspapers from at least twenty-three states or territories published APTL cartoons over the years.Footnote 44 Reprints in states in the West and Midwest, especially in Nebraska and Kansas, can be found in particularly high numbers.Footnote 45 Likewise, certain local newspapers, which printed APTL cartoons on a regular basis, can be found. The weekly Globe-Republican from Dodge City, Kansas, or the weekly Ceredo Advance from Ceredo, West Virginia, are good examples. At least forty-four of the fifty-one issues of the Advance in 1897 and thirty-three of the fifty-two issues of the Globe-Republican in 1902 contained APTL cartoons.Footnote 46 None of the newspapers, which reprinted APTL cartoons, disclosed the cartoons’ actual origin to their readers. The reach of individual cartoons is even harder to ascertain, as the number of undetectable reprints is impossible to know. For example, at least eleven newspapers across the country reprinted the APTL’s 1904 cartoon “The Bourbon Nero.”Footnote 47 Other cartoons with a similar or lower number of detectable local reprints can also be found frequently. At least one APTL cartoon even appeared in translation in a German trade magazine.Footnote 48
The APTL’s distribution system indicates the existence of a vibrant circulation and reuse market for protectionist cartoons. Large suppliers, like the APTL, could distribute their cartoons (and other material) to numerous smaller papers and thus ensure a wide circulation that far exceeded the number of the original papers’ subscribers. In this way, the APTL could ensure that millions of Americans read their material, including cartoons, while the majority of those readers most likely never even heard of the League at all.Footnote 49 As Bonnie Miller has explained using the example of American First World War cartoons, this kind of circulation mechanism also reinforced a “shared language of stock images; caricatures of recognizable political entities … that followed prescriptive patterns of popular iconography.”Footnote 50 In other words, the circulation of cartoons from the American Economist underscores the generalizability of the tropes, symbols, metaphors, and themes they contain. This development of something like a communal visual vocabulary of American protectionism was further strengthened by the fact that the APTL invited local editors to share ideas and inspirations for future cartoons to be drawn for the American Economist. Footnote 51 It was, thus, not just the APTL, the American Economist, or their artists who participated in the shared protectionist imagination expressed through the cartoons, but a sizable number of editors and readers of protectionist-leaning newspapers across the country.
The Mode and Style of the American Economist’s Cartoon Communication
Like most editorial newspaper cartoons of the late nineteenth century, the cartoons of the American Economist enthymematically alluded to an established reservoir of readily understandable themes and metaphors. This reservoir of references was usually based on the social environment and viewing habits of the target audience: middle-class newspaper readers. Cartoonists borrowed from their educational canon, including classical mythology, Shakespeare, contemporary literature, or the Bible, and from popular legends, fairytales, fables, or nursery rhymes.Footnote 52 Especially though, scenes from everyday life, work situations, and popular free-time activities were constantly invoked.Footnote 53 Three techniques allowed cartoonists to equip these motives with political meaning. First, object descriptions written directly onto a specific element of the cartoon assigned symbolic meaning to these elements and connected their drawn function to a political equivalent. Second, all cartoons published in the American Economist featured a title or a caption. Often, this title was another indicator of the cartoon’s political meaning – sometimes the only one.Footnote 54 Lastly, known and established cartoon characters appeared (or reappeared) frequently and also served to create political meaning.
Of these characters, Uncle Sam was the usual protagonist in the cartoons of the American Economist. His frequent reappearance mirrored the increasing nationalization of American politics and media, which the rapid technical advances of the late nineteenth century fostered even further: the nation had become a tangible entity in the lives of ordinary Americans. As a cartoon character, Uncle Sam was somewhat ambivalent as he could either represent the United States government, the American nation in the abstract, or the American people in general. All three of these representations can be found in the cartoons of the American Economist, but the latter two were more frequent. Often, the cartoons showed the consequences of protectionist tariff policies for individual Americans by depicting Uncle Sam as the prototypical American. His reflection of the American national character, but also his appearance in a large variety of scenes from everyday life and culture, made Uncle Sam and the protectionist message that was attached to him relatable to middle-class Americans.Footnote 55 In these depictions, Uncle Sam represented the self-image of the United States as an increasingly confident, yet acutely self-aware, rising nation. At times triumphant and sure of success, but also honest, intelligent, and diligent, Uncle Sam usually represented a mixture of an ingenious Yankee and an (overly) idealistic Don Quixote.Footnote 56 Apart from Uncle Sam, other national depictions of the United States, like the American Eagle or Columbia, occasionally appeared in the cartoons of the American Economist. Footnote 57 Yet, the passivity and gravitas ascribed by Victorian gender norms regarding female figures, especially to a quasi-goddess like Columbia, and the given constraints of animalic representations limited the spectrum of depictable behavior. In this regard, Uncle Sam truly was America’s “all-purpose national symbol” – including in the cartoons of the American Economist. Footnote 58
Whereas Uncle Sam consistently appeared as the most prominent protagonist, the role of his quintessential antagonist underwent a major shift in the cartoons of the American Economist. In the 1890s, this role was reserved for John Bull as the personification of Great Britain. John Bull had originally been a positive British self-image, but, in the American context, he had a long tradition as a negative counter to American self-identifications.Footnote 59 A peculiar mixture of grudging respect toward Britain, coated in loud, aggressive, and often hysterical xenophobia, was pervasive throughout the Gilded Age, but politically especially powerful within the protectionist tradition.Footnote 60 Anglophobia was a “leitmotif for a variety of forms of economic nationalism,” and, consequently, Britain, the prototypical “Free Trade Nation,” was a crucial negative reference point for American protectionists. Protectionist agitators scorned their opponents, such as Grover Cleveland, not just for their tariff reduction demands but also consistently portrayed them as mere executioners of British interests.Footnote 61 In the American Economist, the frequent appearance of Uncle Sam rejecting John Bull’s attempts to enter the American market or to spread free trade in the United States mirrored and reinforced this Anglophobic strain of American protectionism.Footnote 62
The depiction of John Bull as America’s quintessential antagonist also fostered a nationalist view of international trade as essentially a zero-sum game and a fierce competition between different national economies. By attaching protectionist ideas to given ideological frameworks like American nationalism or Anglophobia, and by reducing the intricacies of international trade to an essentially personal conflict between two individuals, the use of national cartoon characters like John Bull and Uncle Sam offered to ordinary Americans a heavily simplified, yet highly relatable interpretation of the tariff issue and, perhaps most importantly, a familiar frame of understanding: Uncle Sam had to triumph over John Bull.
Yet as Anglophobia began to decline around the turn of the century, John Bull appeared less frequently in the cartoons of the American Economist. A new antagonist replaced him: the tariff reformer. Beginning in the last years of the nineteenth century, a sizable tariff reform wing formed especially among western (or midwestern) Republicans who advocated moderate tariff decreases and reciprocal trade agreements with other nations, sometimes in alliance with like-minded Democrats. Even though these tariff reformers did, in fact, not seek to abandon protectionism altogether, they were anathema to ultra-protectionist standpatters, like the APTL, who regarded the slightest downward tariff revision as a treacherous and unpardonable deviation from protectionist orthodoxy.Footnote 63
Whereas John Bull was an opponent or a rival, the tariff reformer was a saboteur. As protectionists now perceived the threat to their political hegemony to come from within, the cartoon version of the tariff reformer appeared as a devious backstabber sabotaging the American economy.Footnote 64 Depictions of a coarse and simple-minded ruffian, a tariff tinkerer engaged in ruthless acts of sabotage, also existed.Footnote 65 But mostly, the tariff reformer appeared as a tall, thin, and often clean-shaven young man dressed in a fancy coat or suit, typically with a top hat and sometimes a bow tie. This appearance marked him as an elitist and an inexperienced and aloof theoretician. In this way, the intellectual tariff reformer as an antagonist offered a strong contrast to a typical protagonist like Uncle Sam as a practical Yankee or an experienced businessman. The cartoons of the American Economist thus transported an interpretation of the APTL’s inner-party rivals that juxtaposed tariff reform as an experimental idea of elitist intellectuals with protectionism as a policy of and for the common man. In this way, the cartoons also mirrored the strong anti-intellectualist current of turn-of-the-century American protectionism.Footnote 66
Nominally, the APTL was nonpartisan. Given its protectionist position, however, the League continuously supported the Republican Party and basically acted as a campaign organization in election years. In its cartoons, depictions of politicians served to reconnect tariff protectionism to electoral politics either positively or negatively. It is no coincidence that William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley, the candidates in the presidential elections of 1896 and 1900, were the two political figures who featured most prominently in the American Economist’s cartoons. Their contest in 1896 pioneered the personalization of presidential politics, which increasingly centered around the presentation of the candidates and their personalities in the early twentieth century.Footnote 67 The representation of politicians as cartoon characters was an especially effective tool in this personalization of politics because it strongly attached a certain political idea to a specific politician without having to present policy details. As the appearances of McKinley and Bryan in the American Economist’s cartoons suggest, the candidates were so strongly associated with the ideas of protectionism or free trade, respectively, that they practically functioned as their personifications.
Bryan was a favorite antagonist of the American Economist, which depicted him in a thoroughly negative fashion. The APTL cartoons on Bryan oscillated between shrill warnings of the dangers which the Nebraskan and his tariff reform ideas allegedly posed, and attempts to portray him as deranged, whiny, or ridiculous. He could be “Bryan The Butcher,” slaughtering American industries with his “Free Trade” knife, or a ridiculous Don Quixote of free trade, who got caught in the “Prosperity” sails of “McKinley’s Protection Mill” alongside his Democratic Donkey.Footnote 68 Given the one-issue focus of the APTL, its negative depictions of Bryan were always connected to his advocacy of tariff reform and never played on his even more pronounced demand for free silver. Still, the APTL’s caricature of Bryan’s personality remained broad enough so that the cartoons appealed to the partisan press and could be used during campaign seasons.
William McKinley, dubbed the “Napoleon of Protection,” who was himself a member of the APTL, was the undisputed hero of the American Economist and the one politician with, by far, the most appearances in its cartoons. McKinley exclusively appeared in a positive framing and was often drawn in a reserved and dignified demeanor that underlined his presidential qualities, especially when compared to the caricatured Bryan.Footnote 69 Frequently, McKinley appeared at the side of Uncle Sam or in support of him.Footnote 70 This function as a sidekick to Uncle Sam underlined McKinley’s APTL-ascribed role as a protectionist benefactor of the American nation. Despite their position as Republican frontrunners in the ensuing presidential elections of 1904 and 1908, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft hardly featured in the APTL’s cartoons. Most probably, this was due to their lack of enthusiasm for tariff protectionism. Whereas McKinley had built his political career on his protectionist credentials and never left a doubt about his unswerving loyalty to the protectionist doctrine, Roosevelt and Taft’s support for protectionist measures was lukewarm at best and rather an outgrowth of inner-party maneuvering. Consequently, they were hardly suitable as standard bearers of the protectionist cause in the cartoons of the American Economist.
Finally, comparison, contrast, and juxtaposition were guiding artistic principles in the cartoons of the American Economist. These characteristics were especially apparent in the constant presentation of protectionism and free trade as two opposing, irreconcilable, and incompatible concepts. Apart from the frequent images of competition between Uncle Sam and John Bull or between McKinley and Bryan, a large variety of metaphors was employed to underscore this dualistic view of the tariff issue.Footnote 71 Images of new and popular pastime activities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently depicted this contrast. Some cartoons referred to sporting competitions like football, boxing, or hockey.Footnote 72 Others invoked automobile, bicycle, horse, or ship races.Footnote 73 Scholars have identified contrast and comparison as fundamental components of almost any political cartoon.Footnote 74 In the case of the American Economist, this constant simplified juxtaposition of protectionism and free trade created an almost Manichaean dualization of the tariff issue and simultaneously reduced the immense number of intricate yet possible political decisions to just two incompatible options.
Producing Fear: Walls, Dikes, Predators, and the Translation of the Tariff
For the case of the presidential campaign of 1884, Makemson notes that protectionist cartoons mainly served to emotionalize the debate and only rarely addressed the economic aspects of the tariff question directly.Footnote 75 A similar pattern can be observed in the APTL’s cartoons. They addressed the economic mechanics of tariff protectionism only seldomly. Rather, the cartoons offered an emotionalized and polemic view, in which the economic aspects of protectionism usually remained underexposed or in the abstract. Accordingly, direct representations of the tariff as a custom procedure, a fiscal practice, or a regulatory institution of international trade were rare among the American Economist’s cartoons. Pictures of custom houses, tollgates, or trading goods appeared only occasionally.Footnote 76
If addressed at all, the tariff’s function of keeping foreign imports off the American market was pictured in an abstracted, metaphorized, and emotionalized way. Striking metaphors of defense, protection, and separation, including walls, fences, dikes, closed gates, castles, and fortresses, were used with high frequency and thus firmly established themselves in the visual vocabulary of the American Economist’s cartoons.Footnote 77 All these metaphors shared the introduction of fear-indulging threats or dangers, e.g., flood waves or besieging and attacking forces, which stood for free trade, its political adherents, or foreign powers. This fearmongering was counterbalanced through the largely passive and defensive symbols representing the tariff. Defense metaphors like dikes, walls, or fortresses underscored the allegedly necessary permanency of a protectionist tariff regime. In the same way a dike is only useful if not even the smallest breach is allowed, the slightest deviation from the traditional protectionist tariff regime was framed as a catastrophe with potentially irreparable consequences. In this way, the tariff was strongly linked to notions of protection and security, while fear and dramatization emotionalized the issue and provided urgency and legitimacy to the cause of tariff protectionism.
The 1906 cartoon “The Dike Cutter,” for example, illustrates both the alleged danger, which free trade represented, and the defensive function attributed to protective tariffs (Figure 3). The cartoon depicts a massive “Protection Dike,” which shields “American Industries,” represented by a few factory buildings, against a dangerously looming sea of “Cheap Labor.” On the dike, a “Tariff Reformer” is depicted as a dike cutter, using a shovel to cut a crack into the dike. The water, labeled “Free Trade,” which continues to burst through the crack, has already flooded the factories beneath. The cartoon illustrates the protectionist claim that free trade would put American industries into direct competition with cheap foreign wages – a competition that American industries allegedly could not survive. To underscore the dramatic situation, the American Economist warned bitterly: “In Holland dike cutting is punishable with death and is looked upon as an act of treason. The Tariff reformer’s course is quite likely to prove as fatal to the best interest of his country and equally an act of disloyalty.” Tariff reformers thus appeared not just as political opponents but as dangerous and treacherous saboteurs.
Figure 3. The stereotyped tariff reformer as a devious dike cutter, destroying the “Protection Dike” and flooding American industries in a sea of cheap labor. American Economist, “The Dike Cutter,” April 27, 1906.
The defensive attitude of many of the APTL’s cartoons was best visible in animalic metaphors taken from the established “Political Bestiary” of American cartoonists.Footnote 78 Images of predator animals chasing and often enough catching their helpless prey appeared frequently.Footnote 79 Metaphors like the watchdog inverted this imagery. Alluding to the infant industry argument, protectionism was pictured as a watchdog or a guardian angel, protecting American industries against the evils and dangers of free trade or international competition.Footnote 80 The stark contrast between threatening monsters or predators and the strong metaphors of innocence and vulnerability used in the representation of American industries, e.g., sleeping infants, puppies, or peacefully grazing rabbits or sheep, served to vindicate the APTL’s style of orthodox protectionism as a defensive undertaking.Footnote 81 These metaphors reflected the self-perception of many American protectionists who understood their political struggle as an essentially defensive, sometimes even heroic mission. This perception was especially true for the APTL. Since the late 1880s, it collected the signatures and valued donations of over 1,000 so-called “Defenders of American Labor and Industries” and published its pamphlets under the title “The Defender.” The American Economist proudly boasted its motto, “Devoted To The Protection Of American Labor And Industries,” on the nameplate of every issue.Footnote 82
“So Near and Yet So Far!” a cartoon published in 1902, featured many of these themes (Figure 4). The cartoon shows “American Industry” as a rabbit, peacefully nibbling on a “Home Prosperity” lettuce leaf. Beyond a high and tightly knit “Protection” wire fence, a hunter, marked as “Importer,” who holds a “Foreign Goods” gun, is shown eagerly observing the rabbit alongside the hunting dogs “Tariff Reduction” and “Reciprocity.” Without the fence, the rabbit would not stand a chance of survival against the hunter and his dogs. Likewise, the cartoon suggests, removing protective tariffs would render American industries defenseless and vulnerable against merciless foreign competition.
Figure 4. American industry depicted as an innocent rabbit protected against outside dangers by a “Protection” fence. American Economist, “So Near and Yet So Far!” January 31, 1902.
The American Economist thus visually imagined the tariff as a necessary protection against dangerously looming outside threats. This kind of dramatization and emotionalization did not aim at the explanation of specific economic problems and their potential solution. On the contrary, fearmongering depictions like these fostered a highly subjective and emotional view of the tariff issue. As Frank Biess notes, fear is by definition a future-oriented emotion. As a driver of behavior, it functions as a hinge, projecting negative experiences of the past into an expected future.Footnote 83 In this way, the fearmongering of the American Economist’s cartoons transformed them into a compelling mobilization call in favor of tariff protectionism: Active support of protectionism was necessary to prevent a repetition of the negatively framed past. But the APTL did not stop there. Apart from this heavy fearmongering, its cartoons also offered a positive and hopeful vision of protectionism: an economic panacea that would bring prosperity to all Americans.
From Crisis to Prosperity: Protectionism as an Economic Panacea
While metaphors like watchdogs, walls, dikes, or fences still alluded to trading practices and custom procedures, albeit in highly metaphorized form, most APTL cartoons did not visualize the tariff at all. Rather, they revolved around protectionism as an abstract idea and focused on its alleged effects, sparing the economic mechanisms that underpinned it. In this way, notions of prosperity, happiness, and abundance were projected onto protectionism and presented as its inevitable consequences. Free trade or any lowering of the given protectionist tariff rates, on the other hand, was negatively framed through pictures of economic misery and hardship. The polarization of the American tariff debate was thus pushed to the extremes, ultimately presenting the alternative between protectionism and free trade as a choice that the American nation had to make between welfare and progress or downfall and decline.
The prominence of the prosperity theme in the American Economist’s cartoons mirrored the rhetoric of McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign, in which the motto “Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity” served to present the Ohioan as the harbinger of protectionist prosperity. But the causal coupling of protectionism and prosperity was also the result of a larger shift in the protectionist argument that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the rapid industrialization, modernization, and expansion of the American economy, the developmental goals of the traditional infant industry argument grew incongruous with the international competitiveness of many American industries. Instead of opting for a gradual lowering of tariff rates, as the conventional Listian rationale would have demanded, standpatters like the APTL rejected any such measure. To these orthodox protectionists, the parallel development of American protectionism and America’s rise to economic and industrial hegemony demonstrated that future prosperity also critically hinged on the continuation of the ultra-protectionist tariff regime. Protectionism was no longer just a booster of early economic development, but an integral tool for the permanent maintenance of an expanding economy; it was not a transient developmental strategy but an eternal prosperity machine.Footnote 84 Cartoons, as the preeminent visual medium of protectionist agitation, did not just reflect this argumentative change revolving around the protection-prosperity link; they actually helped to produce it through their striking and relatable imagery. Whereas tariffs or customs procedures were difficult to present in a visual format, images of prosperity and happiness – or their opposites – were much more relatable to the everyday life and worldview of ordinary Americans and appeared in the American Economist with high frequency.
First and foremost, this link between protectionism and prosperity was graphically enshrined through metaphors of growth and abundance in relation to nature and natural processes, suggesting a naturalization of the alleged nexus.Footnote 85 Through their “appeal to a higher order,” the cartoons addressed deep-seated, almost universally understood, and hardly scrutinized human assumptions about the inevitability of natural processes.Footnote 86 The 1900 cartoon “Flourishing Flower Garden” is an example of this naturalization logic (Figure 5). It shows a happy Uncle Sam contentedly smiling as he waters his flower garden with a big “Protection” watering can. Flowers, labeled “Prosperity,” “Increased Wages,” “Good Times,” “Business Revival,” and “Extension of Trade,” are blossoming. The implication is clear. In the same way flowers blossom only if they are properly watered, all these positive economic effects could only be evoked by the continuous application of a protectionist tariff policy.
Figure 5. Uncle Sam as a happy gardener, fostering economic growth through the successful application of protectionist measures. American Economist, “A Flourishing Flower Garden,” March 23, 1900.
In highlighting the dangers of tariff tinkering, this metaphorical naturalization logic could also be turned against the opponents of protectionism, who allegedly interrupted the seemingly natural growth of protectionist prosperity.Footnote 87 The 1905 cartoon “Will Destroy The Tree Unless Checked” is a striking example of this logic (Figure 6). The cartoon depicts several caterpillars, marked as “Reciprocity” and “Free Trade,” eating away the leaves of a strong “Protection” tree. As a sign of economic activity and prosperity, smoking factory chimneys are visible in the background. Uncle Sam is portrayed looking up at the caterpillars and holding a “Vermin Eradicator” hose. The cartoon illustrates how drastic the language that protectionist agitators used for their political opponents could be. It implied that proponents of free trade or reciprocal trade agreements were harmful to the continuance of American prosperity. Opposing them, the cartoon suggests, was not enough; they had to be eliminated as a political force.
Figure 6. Uncle Sam about to apply “Vermin Eradicator” on the parasites “Free Trade” and “Reciprocity” who eat away the “Protection” tree; a striking example for the drastic terminology that protectionists often used to describe their political opponents. American Economist, “Will Destroy The Tree Unless Checked,” August 18, 1905.
The principle of free trade could also be marked as unnatural, or as exceptional and transient, by linking it to natural phenomena like a “free trade” eclipse, briefly interrupting the natural, seemingly endless shining of the “protection” sun.Footnote 88 Architectural metaphors equipped protectionist dogma with a similar sense of unavoidability. Portraying protectionism as the cornerstone or bedrock of prosperity suggested the necessity for a protectionist tariff policy, but it also implied that any reform attempt of the existing ultra-protectionist regime would inevitably lead to the collapse of prosperity.Footnote 89
Metaphors relating to food and abundance were critical as they represented a highly relatable way of illustrating the practical consumer benefits of protectionist prosperity. Pictures of full dinner tables, especially at Thanksgiving, or happy shoppers in abundantly filled grocery stores addressed the desire of many middle-class Americans for individual welfare.Footnote 90 With regard to laborers, the “full dinner pail” emerged as an often-repeated metaphor to illustrate the higher wages and the better standard of living, which protectionism supposedly offered specifically to industrial workers.Footnote 91 Similarly, representations of industrial productivity served as a more general illustration of protectionist prosperity. Running factories and industrious laborers – and especially smoking chimneys – emerged as central metaphors.Footnote 92 These illustrations of prosperity could also be turned into a warning against a deviation from protectionist orthodoxy. Closed-down factories or unemployed laborers were presented as the result of a non-protectionist tariff policy.Footnote 93 The cartoon “Turning Over a New Leaf,” published only a week after President McKinley had signed the ultra-protectionist Dingley Tariff Act of 1897, presented closed and running factories as contrasting metaphors of economically good or bad times (Figure 7). The cartoon shows Uncle Sam turning a page in a large book. The earlier page “Under Free Trade” shows an unpaved road leading to a closed factory, whereas the later page “Protection” shows a running factory with “Steady Work” and a railroad track in front of it. The cartoon suggests that the return to a protectionist tariff would, by necessity, also instigate a return to economic prosperity.
Figure 7. Uncle Sam turning the page from free trade misery to protectionist prosperity, a common juxtaposition in protectionist agitation. American Economist, “Turning Over A New Leaf,” July 30, 1897.
Importantly, the images of running factories and happy workers with full dinner pails in their hands suggested that protectionism was not just in the interest of wealthy industrialists but allegedly also benefited industrial workers. The Republican Party and protectionists like the APTL constantly promoted the protectionist wage argument to secure the (electoral) support of industrial workers, mostly from the protected industries of the Northeast. This special focus on industrial workers as protectionism’s alleged main beneficiaries alluded to the older protectionist idea of the “Harmony of Interests.” This idea went back to Henry Carey, the leading exponent of American protectionist thought in the early nineteenth century, and described the idealized fiction of a harmonious and non-conflictual cooperation between different societal groups within a nation protected from foreign competition through protective import tariffs.Footnote 94 In the cartoons of the American Economist can be found various depictions of harmony and understanding among stereotyped figures, which represent specific social groups like industrial workers, farmers, or manufacturers. These depictions illustrated the “Harmony of Interests” that a protectionist tariff regime allegedly created.Footnote 95
In short, the prosperity allegedly produced through protectionism was imagined and illustrated as a general blessing producing individual benefits for all Americans and a harmonious national community. Beyond that, the apocalyptic and often nature-related imagery warned against the imminent and potentially catastrophic danger of even a slight lowering of tariff rates. In this way, the American Economist’s cartoons also appealed to the ubiquitous social Darwinist thinking characteristic of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Footnote 96 The constant warnings of the dramatic consequences of free trade inextricably linked the welfare and economic survival of individual Americans to the economic performance of the nation, which in turn was tied to the continuance of an ultra-protectionist tariff policy. In this light, the tariff question was not a minor issue of administering the national economy; it was the determining factor in a merciless struggle for national and individual economic survival.
To relate these general ideas and depictions of individual and collective prosperity, or its opposite, to the lived experience of middle-class Americans, they were constantly connected to the remembered and experienced recent past and thus put into a temporal comparison. In this regard, the second presidency of Grover Cleveland, 1893–1897, and the coincidence of the disastrous Panic of 1893 with the slightly lowered tariff rates of the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, served as especially notorious negative reference points. Even though the Democrats’ tariff policy did not cause the Panic of 1893, the APTL aggressively attempted to connect the harsh economic downturn and the millions of ensuing individual tragedies with the Democratic deviation from protectionist orthodoxy.
Juxtapositions with periods of alleged protectionist prosperity were already common during the debates over the Wilson-Gorman Tariff in the summer of 1894 and the ensuing midterm campaign in the fall. Throughout the year, the American Economist printed cartoons consisting of two opposing pictures, one showing a scene of prosperity from 1892, the year before the crisis when Benjamin Harrison still occupied the White House and the ultra-protectionist McKinley Tariff was still in place, and the other showing a disastrous counterpart from 1894, when Cleveland had taken office (Figure 8).Footnote 97 A busy department store and a full restaurant in 1892 turned into bleak and deserted places in 1894, while a happy farmer amid a well-fed herd of sheep in 1892 had become haggard and miserable alongside his animals. An office clerk, who had busily worked under a sign reading “In Grover We Trust” in 1892, sat at his desk out of work and in frustration under a sign reading “Through Grover We Bust” in 1894. That year was a good time only for an insolvency attorney, who was drawn eagerly to file bankruptcies after he had had no work for two years previously. The message of the images was clear: protectionism in 1892 meant not just prosperity for the nation in general, but also happiness and work for individual Americans, whereas Cleveland’s tariff reform policies in 1894 meant misery and despair.
Figure 8. Several cartoons from 1894, juxtaposing the economic misery after the Panic of 1893 with the earlier boom time of 1892, when the protectionist McKinley Tariff was still in place. American Economist, “1892. 1894,” July 6, 1894; American Economist, “1892. 1894,” July 13, 1894; American Economist, “1892. 1894,” September 28, 1894; American Economist, “1892. 1894,” October 19, 1894; American Economist, “1892. 1894,” October 19, 1894.
Even years after the passing of the protectionist Dingley Tariff in 1897, the American Economist often pictured the retrospective contrast of protectionist prosperity and free trade misery to evoke the memory of the Panic of 1893.Footnote 98 Soup and the soup house emerged as general metaphors of misery and poverty that reminded readers of the crisis-ridden Cleveland years. A postcard from 1906, which featured a cartoon that had also been printed in the American Economist, serves as an example (Figure 9). The cartoon depicts a bowl of “Cleveland Soup 1893,” with a “Democracy” spoon in it and “Free Trade” steam evaporating from it. Thirteen years after its onset, the cartoon directly addressed readers’ memory of the Panic of 1893 – “Lest We Forget” – and linked free trade to “Strikes,” “Lock-Outs,” and “No Work” as its economic effects. A thousand copies of the postcard could be ordered from the APTL for $2.50.Footnote 99
Figure 9. An APTL postcard from 1906, reminding its readers of the crisis-ridden Cleveland years. American Economist, “Souvenir Postal Card,” October 5, 1906.
The evocation of an individual and collective crisis memory, centered around the Panic of 1893, carried a heavy load of fearmongering. It targeted the status anxieties of middle-class Americans. The juxtaposition of images of protectionist prosperity and pictures of free trade misery, hardship, and destitution addressed widespread desires for orderliness, stability, security, and private happiness and attempted to project them onto the tariff issue. Depictions of Victorian ideals of respectability and domesticity frequently accompanied the general promise of protectionist prosperity. They illustrated the results of a protectionist tariff policy as possible exits from the insecurity and instability that the turbulent boom-and-bust cycle of the Gilded Age economy had created for millions of Americans.Footnote 100 An 1897 cartoon contained a telling juxtaposition (Figure 10). Under “Free-Trade,” it showed Uncle Sam in despair as a scruffy homeless man, sitting on the street, holding a cardboard sign reading “I Am Busted” and begging for money with his tattered hat. Under “Protection,” on the other hand, Uncle Sam was depicted happily sitting at home in a comfortable armchair, enjoying fruit and a drink, puffing a cigar, and reading the American Economist. The cartoon appeared only days after William McKinley had succeeded Grover Cleveland as president and delivered an unequivocal message to middle-class Americans: McKinley was to initiate an era of protectionist prosperity that was to replace the crisis-ridden Cleveland years. As the cartoon implied, this would put an end to the turbulence and hardship of the previous years and provide order, stability, and security for ordinary Americans.
Figure 10. Free trade homelessness and protectionist domesticity, a common contrast that attempted to capitalize on Americans’ desire for orderliness, stability, and security. American Economist, “Free-Trade. Protection,” March 12, 1897.
Recently, Robert Shiller has underlined the importance of narrativity for economic history. According to him, economic thinking and decision making are not a rational processes of maximizing benefits; rather, they is decisively shaped by narrative explanations of economic phenomena.Footnote 101 However, as Laetitia Lenel, Alexander Nützenadel, and others have rightfully observed, “the actors remain surprisingly opaque” in Shiller’s account. Lenel stresses the importance of crises and their interpretation for the creation and popularization of economic narratives. Understanding economic narratives as a “causal explanation that links different elements in time,” she concludes, “new economic narratives emerge in times of crisis and shattered assumptions, enter the sphere of policy making, and in so doing help enable these narratives to adequately describe the economy.”Footnote 102 The case of the APTL and its cartoons, then, is a telling example of the importance of specific political actors attempting to control the popularly accepted narrative explanation of economic crises to ultimately shape economic policy. Economic narratives did not just arise; they were created and purposefully propagated. Skillfully, the APTL exploited the disastrous Panic of 1893 and the hardship and uncertainty it had created among ordinary Americans by establishing its own narrative explanation that the disaster was due to the previous deviation from protectionist orthodoxy.
Conclusion
The Economist has waged unceasing war in the interest of Protection and has used the pencils of the cartoonists as freely as it has the pens of able writers on economic questions. What it has accomplished as an educator cannot be accurately measured. But when it is known that the constant dripping of water will wear a hole through a stone, it may be easily surmised that the steadfastness of the American Economist to the American principle has not been without results.Footnote 103
Proudly, the American Economist reprinted this assessment from the Grand Rapids Herald in 1898. Obviously, the Herald’s praises of the APTL’s cartoons were not just flattering. They also expressed the APTL’s conviction that cartoons were an especially effective medium of political messaging. The same way constantly dripping water wears away the stone, the American Economist furnished readers with a constant flood of weekly cartoons, which served to establish a canon of shared visual metaphors and images forcefully hammering home the League’s protectionist messages.
Yet it is rather doubtful that the American Economist acted as an “educator” as the Herald declared. As demonstrated, the APTL rarely illustrated the economic mechanisms behind tariff protectionism. Not explanation, illustration, and education, but emotionalization, decontextualization, dramatization, and fearmongering were the modi operandi of its cartoons. The cartoons juxtaposed apocalyptic images of the allegedly universal catastrophe that any lowering of tariff rates could evoke with quasi-paradisiacal conditions offered by ultra-protectionist tariff policies, and thus offered a peculiar mix of fearmongering and promise. In this way, the cartoons presented protectionism as a simple yet effective solution that would usher in a period of permanent economic prosperity and stability, offering individual welfare and happiness to all Americans. The known and experienced economic miseries of the recent past, on the other hand, were presented as a possibly recurring danger lurking behind any downward tariff revision proposal.
In a larger context, the study of protectionist cartoons offers new perspectives on the political attractiveness of the protectionist argument in turn-of-the-century America. Historians and economists have usually pointed to the strong political influence of wealthy industrialists from protected industries to explain American protectionism’s astonishing longevity. Yet, to understand the broad and continuous political support for protectionist tariff policies and the ferociousness of the tariff debate in general, our conceptualization of protectionism needs to be expanded beyond that of a narrow elite project or a merely rational calculation of material interests. As the cartoons demonstrate, protectionist agitators successfully exploited deep-seated moral and normative assumptions of ordinary Americans, their anxieties, hopes, and aspirations, but also their individual and collective economic and political experiences, and projected them onto the tariff issue. They turned protectionism into an emotionally grounded and deeply ideological worldview narratively underpinned and strongly intertwined with nationalism and xenophobia. Including these ideological and cultural aspects into our understanding of American protectionism and the forces that underpinned its continuation does not mean to deny the high importance of material interests. After all, it was industrial organizations like the APTL who financed and organized the widespread distribution of these cartoons. Rather, it is specifically the embedding of material interests in wider but equally powerful ideological and cultural currents – a “colour version of political economy” as Frank Trentmann has produced for the British case – that holds the potential to deliver an encompassing explanation of American protectionism’s continued appeal.Footnote 104 In this endeavor, the protectionist imaginary, as presented in the American Economist’s cartoons, is a promising starting point.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Veronika Settele for helpful comments on an earlier version 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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