Economic Nationalism
Address by Ambassador William Dodd at the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany, Berlin, October 12, 1933
(Original in the FDR Presidential Library)
I.
In times of great stress men are too apt to abandon too much of their past social devices and venture too far upon unchartered courses. And, the consequence has always been reaction, sometimes disaster. With the breakdown of the old Roman democracy after the enormous success of the Punic Wars, great group leaders contending for personal and group advantages brought the Republic to the verge of collapse. Then a Caesar rose, asserted autocratic powers and for a time stabilized society. The great fact so appealed to Gibson that he wrote the masterpiece of all historical work. He overlooked or under-emphasized the cruelties and the outside exploitation of his golden empire.
I allude to this because human governmental and economic combinations have always appeared under a few patterns and both philosophers and politicians waver and hesitate between the models offered in a Cato, a Gracchus or a Julius Caesar and the ideals which these figures connote. There are not many forms of human association — though many new names have been invented from time to time.
Half-educated statesmen today swing violently away from the ideal purpose of the first Gracchus and think they find salvation for their troubled fellows in the arbitrary modes of the man, who fall an easy victim to the cheap devices of the lewd Cleopatra. They forget that the Gracchus democracy failed upon the narrowest of margins and the Caesars succeeded only for a short moment as measured by the test of history.
II.
As in ancient times, so in modern. When the Spanish were dumping shiploads of South American gold and silver per year into the medieval complex of economic Europe, and prices, wages and currency values got as much out of all control as they are today, men cast about wildly for remedies.
There have rarely been more chaotic times in human history than those of the hundred years which followed the discovery of American and the religious reforms of Martin Luther. No nation’s existence was half secure; no economic class rested upon sure foundation; peasants wandered aimlessly about their countries, starving by the hundreds of thousands; and city proletarians were everywhere ready to turn pirates upon the seas or mercenary soldiers upon the land. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, England was confronted with imminent chaos, and forty-five years later France was in even worse plight, though victorious in the Thirty Years’ War.
We must not think our generation is the only one that has suffered from violent economic and social disruptions. The Puritan fathers thought to redistribute the benefits of government and make England a model land; the Fronde rioters of France and Paris thought to anticipate the revolution of 1789.
III.
Out of these chaotic eras there came two try-outs of economic nationalism, applied by autocratic methods. The first system was worked out by the marvelous little group of statesmen that surrounded Charles II. In 1660–1673 the aged Earl of Clarendon, a politician and a master historian, aided by the unscrupulous Duke of Buckingham, the canny Lord Arlington and the profiteer Duke of Albemarle, worked out a marvelous system which was to save England and fit all the trans-Atlantic colonies into a water-tight system. It was unlawful to ship a pound of gold out of the country. No foreign goods were to be imported except upon a sort of quota system. A monopoly market was created for sugar, tobacco and ship timber, produced in the colonies. All “quota” imports from the colonies were taxed at two to four times their producers’ value to enable to government to ignore public opinion and collect taxes without the consent of the people. Merchants and manufacturers were authorized to sell their goods to the public at prices fixed by the government. And surplus products were to be dumped upon the continental market at half the prices paid at home. It was a marvelously perfect scheme under which workers on the land were to have no return at all for their labor, landlords somewhat more and industrialists and traders princely profits. His Majesty, Charles II, was to be autocratic master of the system and make war upon Holland, the one rival and free-trade advocate which might upset the scheme.
But no scheme has ever worked well more than a decade or two without popular support, and when the King had beaten Holland in 1674 and annexed all strategic points in North America, the craft Earl of Shaftsbury counseled by the canny John Locke, moved into the slums of London, organized groups of shouting, hurrahing followers, gained control of a parliament which could no longer be postponed and brought the cheap autocrat’s life to a miserable end in 1684; and the long subdued lower middle classes of the country united with the new aristocracy and made the unloved William III of Holland King of England. All the larger cities and more developed shires, supported by the angry colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina, shouted loud hurrahs. It was the “glorious revolution,” hardly a score of lives lost in the process. All the strenuous decrees of Charles II became dead letters which no one seriously heeded. Seventy years later, when George III tried to revamp the system, the colonies revolted and started a world commotion, which lasted thirty years. Stuart economic nationalism had failed.
IV.
The English had hardly launched their scheme before John Baptiste Colbert, master statesman about Louis XIV, contrived a better system for the perfect government of France. Son of a moor trader in Rheims, he invented a pedigree, which proved him to be of noble birth, and he managed to get it to the snobbish young monarch. That was enough.
He was granted despotic powers. He dispossessed hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they resisted, and so readjusted taxes that Louis henceforth had income enough to wage war when he would, and, at the same time, pension every promising leader or emerging writer, not excluding scores in Germany and Spain. The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued, parliaments were not allowed to assemble, while the nouveaux riche and all the talent of the time were allowed to bask in the sunshine of the royal presence.
The young monarch rose to unparalleled eminence in Europe and Colbert applied by decree an import-export system like that of England.
Nothing could come in except upon approval and the payment of high tariffs. Every surplus, except gold, must go out at whatever prices could be obtained. A third class like that of England arose. Monopoly privileges prevailed everywhere. A countryman who objected to aristocratic hunters running over his ripe wheat fields was simply shot like a pheasant or a partridge. France was wonderfully organized from the top-like Augustus Caesar’s reorganised Rome. There was not a popular assembly in a hundred and forty years, and terrorizing wars were the older of the time 1666–7, 1672–6, 1683–7, 1690–97, 1701–13. France was perfectly pyramided at home and on the continent. The glamor of Versailles was seen and imitated all over Germany, while thousands of men rotted in French prisons because they had ventured to protect; and peasant farmers reached so low an estate that, like North American Indians, they lived off roots and herbs or died unswept along the roadside, as they do today in a great minority government of our time.
It was the economic nationalism which “had saved France after the chaotic days of Mazarin.” However, it collapsed in 1789 with a crash and a thunder which reverberated for a score of years all over the world. Thus, the best laid schemes of Bourbon autocrats failed as dismally as that of their Stuart cousins. Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?
V.
When Napoleon I came to his end in 1815, a great world congress had set everything to rights in Vienna and told everybody how to behave for a hundred years; but soon came the accustomed chaos in victorious as well as defeated countries. From 1818 to 1846 there was depression; here and there, everywhere, as now the markets of Europe, except for cotton, were dead for young America, and Europe was distracted by debts and new revolutions. Would mankind never learn the effects of war?
In far-off Kentucky, a lean, lanky, half-educated, but clever orator, Henry Clay, worked out in 1823 another system of economic nationalism. He would bar the ports of the United States against cheap, but excellent European goods, associate all Latin-American peoples with those of his own country, create huge markets by building cities, roadways, and canals and leave the builders of the new industry and the new-old banking system the utmost freedom in exploiting their fellows. It was an unconscious imitation of the English and the French systems of the seventeenth century — the fussy, cantankerous John Randolph was about the only member of Congress, who knew enough of history, to give Clay’s so-called “American system” its proper European name. Clay fought long and hard, always dreaming of the Presidency for himself, and the ability to reward his ablest lieutenants, Daniel Webster and the unscrupulous bank president, Nicholas Biddle, with plushy jobs and honourifics. He was defeated by the rising cotton kingdom in the South and it was left to the troubled Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great war, 1861–64, to grant industrialists and bankers all that the dead Clay had promised them.
The economic nationalism, which Benjamin Franklin and George Mason had feared and warned Washington against, was now firmly fixed on “free American soil” and its success was far greater than that of Clarendon or Colbert. England, France and Germany had, after long debates, adopted in the main the Adam Smith philosophy on which the Americans had gone to war in 1776. That is, Europe had adopted the ideals of Young America and opened their markets in order to sell their growing industrial output to the far corners of the world. The United States had adopted the attitude of Europe in 1776 and closed their vast domestic market while they sold billions of dollars’ worth of foodstuffs to England, France and Germany.
There had never been anything like it in all history. England and Germany developed more in fifty years than either of them had developed in the preceding five hundred years. It was the machine age, and populations increased faster than machines. Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia inventor, showed American farmers how to grow wheat at thirty cents a bushel and produce meat at two cents a pound. And American farmers, aided by free land and new machines, drove British and German farmers out of business and crowded them on to emigrant boats bound for the farms of the great West. “Everybody was getting rich.”
But the masters of industry, of railroads and banks managed to pocket nearly all the profits and there came a depression and an outcry, which all but enabled the young William Jennings Bryan to work a revolution in 1896. He failed on a narrow margin through bribed votes, and the system was sustained in wobbly estate till Europe went to war in 1914 as France had done in 1805. The outcome all the world knows. The marvelous American system seemed successful when it was not, and the Presidents of 1921–28 with their optimistic Secretary of Treasury thought it a sort of millennium which must rapidly cover the earth. To this dream, a later President added the prophesy that poverty, the curse of mankind, would be abolished when he took his seat in the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.
VI.
But the collapse came in 1929; it was almost as terrible as that of 1789 in Paris. The hopeful, buoyant United States now fell into the economic chaos into which the Great War had thrust all the states of Europe. The unemployed outnumbered the dead and wounded of the recent struggle. In place of Hoover’s universal and everlasting prosperity, there was threat of universal poverty. The American economic nationalism the dangers of which Franklin and Mason had foreseen in 1787 had run its course — as had the schemes of Clarendon and Colbert.
In conclusion, one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system, which implies control of society by privilege seekers, has ever ended in any other way than collapse. The wisest of all American statesmen insisted all his life that the way to develop the ideal social order was to leave every man the utmost freedom of initiative and action and always to forbid any man or group of men to profiteer at the expense of others. May we not reasonably expect the statesmen of today a sufficient knowledge of the blunders of the past to realize that if western civilization is to survive, they must find a way to avoid the crime and the terrific disasters of war; they must learn how to develop in a friendly spirit the resources of undeveloped regions of the world; they must lower, not raise, the barriers against the migration of surplus populations; and they must facilitate, and not defeat, the interchange of surplus goods — with these rational changes of international procedure, a higher culture might easily be carried to the masses of men everywhere; without these, another war and chaos.
