Historians trace the roots of protectionist thought to pre-Civil War America, where tariffs were viewed as a necessary policy to advance manufacturing and protect workers from industrialization's drawbacks. Proponents believed tariffs could safeguard American wages and enable social-economic mobility, counteracting the challenges faced in Europe. Henry Carey became a pivotal figure in solidifying this ideology, uniting various economic, political, and social ideas around protectionism. However, by the late 19th century, the reality of the industrial economic landscape diverged significantly from earlier promises made by protectionists about tariffs.
Protectionists presented tariffs as the essential policy to quicken the development of manufactures as well as a remedy to the social ills that afflicted the emerging industrial working class.
Imagining tariffs as a paternalistic state response to the legitimate concerns of workers, protectionists ensured that industrialization in the U.S. would not follow the same declining course as it had in Britain.
Henry Carey, a Philadelphia printer who later became President Abraham Lincoln's economic adviser, united what had been a set of disparate ideas about trade policy into an all-encompassing ideology.
By the end of the 19th century, the industrial social-economic order that tariffs helped foster were quite different from what earlier protectionists had promised.
Collection
[
|
...
]