In June 1982, as employment in the U.S. auto industry continued to plummet, two white autoworkers, one of them recently laid off, started harassing a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin in a Detroit strip joint. “You little motherfucker, you’re the reason we don’t have jobs,” one of them, Ronald Ebens, spat out. When Chin, there to celebrate his upcoming wedding, confronted them, a fight broke out. Chin left the club, but the two men later found him in a McDonald’s, chased him down the street, and beat him to death with baseball bats.
Chin’s murder was only the most famous example of the widespread, often vicious anti-Asian racism that followed the “Buy American” campaigns and popular economic nationalism of the 1970s and ’80s, when cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars from Japan, Germany, and eventually South Korea began to displace those made in the United States.
Such campaigns have a longer history, dating all the way back to the American Revolution. With the “nonimportation” movement, elites called on ordinary colonists to eschew British products and purchase goods made in the colonies—a campaign that culminated in the Boston Tea Party. Then as now, the class and race politics of economic nationalism were thick: the same elites leading the charge were quick to slip in pricey imports on the sly (Thomas Jefferson, while publicly supporting nonimportation, nonetheless ordered a fancy mahogany pianoforte from London for his wife) or put those they enslaved to work making “homespun” cloth, as George Washington did—ostentatiously—for his inauguration.
Patriotic shopping lay dormant until the early 1930s, when, as a supposed answer to the Great Depression, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a daily “Buy American” campaign in all twenty-seven of his newspapers. For decades, Hearst had raised alarms about a “yellow peril” invading U.S. shores; his campaigns are in part responsible for the mass incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans a decade later during World War II.
Promises to reinvigorate American manufacturing and bring back American jobs have featured in nearly every presidential campaign in recent memory, but Donald Trump, with his first election in 2017, twisted those ideas into a dark, resentful fusion of economic nationalism and unqualified hostility toward immigrants. “We will follow two simple rules. Buy American and Hire American,” he thundered in his 2017 inaugural address, in lines that his speechwriting team—which included Stephen Miller, then his immigration advisor and today his Deputy Chief of Staff—could have cribbed directly from one of Hearst’s papers. Even before the election, economic and political analyst Marcus Noland found that “the Trump campaign’s articulation of protectionist positions and the use of racially charged, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic political language amounted to a self-reinforcing package.”
A little over a year into his presidency, Trump began to turn his rhetoric into reality, starting a trade war with China with the introduction of tariffs on steel, electric vehicles, and solar panels. Those moves set the stage for 2020, when the grassroots anti-immigrant fervor that Trump had whipped up from his base during the campaign found a new target in China, which people were quick to charge with planting the COVID virus in the United States. It was not long before that anger erupted into violence against those of Asian descent—most sickeningly, in random attacks on senior citizens in the streets.
This April, Trump ratcheted up the tension still further by launching a full-throttle trade war with seemingly the entire world, announcing massive tariffs that he promised would thwart the evil intentions of other nations and promote investment once again in U.S. manufacturing. It’s already clear how economically destructive his threats are: they wreak havoc with longtime, mutually beneficial trade relations, disrupt the ability of firms to plan ahead, put agricultural exports at risk, sink the stock market, and threaten hyperinflation. But it’s also crucial to understand how they work hand in glove with his brutal hostility to immigrants—and how, regardless of how the trade wars turn out, that combination will likely foster waves of popular and state-sponsored violence once again.
As we struggle to answer his policies with progressive alternatives, the history of popular economic nationalism and its often-racist politics offers a powerful warning. The answer, though, isn’t a return to a destructive free trade regime, but, rather, a reframing of trade politics to place working people—all working people—first.
“Buy American and spend American,” Hearst’s papers proclaimed in lockstep in December 1932. “Keep American money in America and for American citizens.” Cartoons, testimonials, columns, and editorials kept up the refrain daily. Hearst’s campaign explicitly fused foreign workers with foreign products. “We have as much RIGHT TO EXCLUDE CERTAIN IMPORTS DANGEROUS to our AMERICAN STANDARDS AND IDEALS,” one editorial boomed, “as we have the right to EXCLUDE certain IMMIGRATION which is a MENACE TO OUR AMERICAN STANDARDS AND IDEALS.”
The dangerous products and people Hearst claimed were destroying the nation were, above all, Japanese—despite the fact that, at the time, there were only around 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent living in the country. His papers threw out the pejorative word “Jap” gleefully, and warned darkly of imported bulbs, actors, oysters, and “slippery alien fish” brought in by sneaky, inscrutable Japanese.
Popular imagery at the time conjured apocalyptic visions of waves of Asians and their goods threatening to submerge the United States. Historian Lothrop Stoddard—member of both the Ku Klux Klan and American Eugenics Society—warned, in his 1920 bestseller The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, of the “teeming colored races” who, through migrations, “would swamp whole populations” of white people. As part of his Buy American campaign, Hearst ran a major five-part series in which Stoddard espoused Asian racial evil’s threat to white supremacy. (The essays would overlap with a regular column by Benito Mussolini.)
Hearst’s campaigns dangerously promoted hostility to immigrants that surged during the Depression. Secretary of Labor William Doak, delivering a ringing endorsement for the newspaper magnate’s Buy American agenda in 1932, announced that “the United States Department of Labor is striving to keep from this country alien workers who would enter into competition with Americans.” In the early years of the Great Depression, Doak oversaw the forced ejection, known as Repatriation, of as many as a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans as well as the direct deportation of tens of thousands of Filipinos, Mexicans, and other immigrants—especially those who had been involved in labor activism.
“Buy American” campaigns almost completely receded for the next three decades as the United States dominated the postwar global economy. In those years, free trade, not protectionism, served both corporations and many U.S. manufacturing workers. But in the 1970s and ’80s, when U.S. corporations—including the “Big Three” automakers Ford, GM, and Chrysler—fled overseas in search of cheaper wages and lax environmental restrictions, grassroots “Buy American” campaigns returned with a vengeance, once again blaming Japan, the Japanese people, and even all Asians in the United States for the loss of jobs. Reports began to emerge of disgruntled Detroit autoworkers taking sledgehammers to Japanese-made cars.
The leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which represented employees of the Big Three, were happy to allow such popular resentment to fester among its rank and file; hostility to Japan, they hoped, would divert criticism of the leadership’s submissive, largely ineffectual negotiations with the auto manufacturers rapidly moving production overseas. The UAW soon itself promoted anti-Japanese hostility, albeit on a smaller scale. A sign appeared at the parking lot of the union’s Detroit headquarters announcing: “UAW PARKING RESERVED FOR U.S. AND CANADIAN VEHICLES ONLY. PLEASE PARK IMPORTS ELSEWHERE.” And in May 1981 Solidarity, the union’s official magazine, ran a story called “THE TRACTOR INVASION” that pictured a fleet of tractors carrying Japanese flags climbing out of the ocean onto U.S. shores.
Meanwhile, popular campaigns revived the use of “Jap” and with it, racist stereotypes. Pearl Harbor and atomic bomb references proliferated. One 1991 image that appeared on t-shirts, mugs, and at gun shows featured a mushroom cloud and the words “MADE IN AMERICA. TESTED IN JAPAN.” That same year, when a group of Girl Scouts of Japanese descent sat outside a grocery store selling cookies, a shopper told them: “I only buy from American girls.” Months later, Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, a murder mystery that warned sensationally of a future Japanese economic invasion, became a number-one bestseller.
Corporate interests jumped onto the bandwagon with shameless hypocrisy. In 1985 Wal-Mart launched an initiative called “Bring It Home to the USA,” in which the megacorporation promised to purchase U.S.-made goods for special sections (toward which shoppers were directed with enormous American flags) and develop U.S. manufacturing sources that would create and retain jobs. In 1992 it claimed to have created 41,000 of those jobs and kept billions of dollars inside the United States. But a Dateline NBC report aired in 1992 revealed that jackets sold in the “Bring It Home to the USA” section were not made by U.S. workers but by Bangladeshi children, some as young as eleven. And in those same years, Wal-Mart was paying its 365,000 non-unionized store workers a pittance, destroying U.S. small businesses through ruthless competition, and continuing to outsource manufacturing throughout the world.
Trump’s trade wars have already revived latent hostility to Japan. “We sell zero cars to Japan,” FOX News host Jeainne Pirro (now the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.) ranted in April. “You look out on this street, you’ve got Mitsubishis, Hondas, Mazdas, Subarus.” That same month, Miller took to Twitter to warn dramatically of a “53 BILLION annual automotive trade deficit with Japan” as well as billions with Europe and South Korea. “Our allies have shut their markets to our cars,” he wrote, “while our market has been flooded with theirs.”
Even the National Review pointed out, though, that U.S.-made vehicles don’t sell in Japan because buyers there are looking for products that U.S. manufacturers largely don’t offer: safe, fuel-efficient cars small enough to fit on Japanese roads. But while Trump’s trade wars have proven widely unpopular—and divisive within his own party—the stark anti-immigrant hostility that is part and parcel of his economic nationalism has not. Now, as Trump flip-flops through an aggressive economic war with China and begins to challenge Japan, is a new wave of unabated anti-Asian fervor on its way?
It is not the working people of other countries who have driven down wages and working conditions in the United States in the past fifty years. Much of the blame can be placed on the much-vaunted free trade regime for which many are now wistful: a set of policies that threw open the door for transnational corporations to flit about the world, investing wherever they chose, seeking ever-lower working conditions and environmental standards, and playing workers in multiple countries against each other in what’s known as the “race to the bottom.” Since the 1970s steel, auto, electrical parts, and other manufacturers within U.S. borders have gradually, but not entirely, moved overseas.
The crude economic nationalism touted as a solution to outsourcing assumes a virtuous circuit in which profits, newly extracted in the United States as a result of “protective” tariffs, will be reinvested within the country’s borders. But corporations and capital have no particular loyalty to U.S. workers; their obligation is to seek out the highest rate of return wherever it lies. Indeed, they have actively worked to ensure trade policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, that have made global labor exploitation most lucrative.
Today, the supposed golden age of U.S. trade dominance and industrial might is long gone. It was based on the ability of U.S.-based manufacturing to out-compete other countries in the aftermath of World War II’s economic devastation, and enforced by a global military machine that for decades repressed the ability of less-developed countries to develop import substitution, regional trade alliances, and socialist alternatives.
Trump’s wrecking-ball approach will not be able to reverse the forces that have reshaped the global economy; nor will his reckless, disruptive tariffs entice capital to come flocking back into U.S. manufacturing. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in the New Yorker, “Businesses need stability to make the kinds of major capital investments that building new factories in this country requires, not a climate defined by ninety-day pauses and abrupt reversals.”
And what about the “good factory jobs” of yore that the tariffs’ proponents hope will spring back up in places like deindustrialized Detroit? It’s worth remembering that the steel, auto, and electrical manufacturing jobs of the 1930s and ’40s that provided pensions, health care, and paid vacations were the hard-won product of struggles by the powerful interracial unions in the CIO—and that those wins came at a time when the federal government overtly supported union organizing.
Far too many U.S. workers have fallen into the trap of anti-immigrant nationalism, a worldview in which the enemy isn’t the anti-union corporations skipping about the world but other working people. Even the labor movement has taken the bait: the week before Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs in April, the United Auto Workers praised Trump. “We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades,” declared its president, Shawn Fain. Condemning free trade is one thing, but in praising Trump—apparently to placate right-wing UAW members in hopes of getting re-elected—Fain has legitimated both the president’s authoritarian takeover of federal power and his dangerous nationalism. Prominent Democrats, including Tim Kaine and Elizabeth Warren, have also tried to walk the tightrope, insisting that yes, some tariffs are good—just not these ones. But in the absence of their forceful public support for a national mass movement challenging Trump, their comments sound like concessions, not elements of an alternative industrial policy.
What might that policy look like? It’s clear that the answer is not a return to a romanticized free-trade regime in which working people of the world are pitted against each other. Nor is it economic nationalism in which ruthless corporations are free to exploit domestic workers without constraints. We are just beginning a long-absent conversation about what a progressive politics of trade actually looks like—one that takes into account the whole economy, not just manufacturing. Any progressive visions of the just economy needs to start with a trade politics that puts workers’ rights, in every country, front and center in all trade agreements, and welcomes immigrants as essential contributors to the United States.
The UAW, to its credit, has already proposed a standardized minimum wage for manufacturing workers in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, to be negotiated as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the successor to NAFTA. “Workers on two sides of a border should not be competing with one another in a race to the bottom,” Fain has said of the proposal. Putting any of these ambitious visions into practice, though, will require building a powerful, visionary labor movement once again, as well as ensuring that it works hand in hand with the full spectrum of progressive forces in this country—and beyond its borders.
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