Financial History Issue 112 (Winter 2015) | Page 32
In one of their four debates, on October
11, 1869, Perry and Greeley locked horns
in Boston. It was a damp New England
night as coastal cities were recovering
from high tides caused by the category two
hurricane, “Saxby Gale.” The hurricane
was named for Stephen Martin Saxby,
a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy,
whose published prediction of the storm
had been ignored.
According to coverage in The New York
Times the following day, Perry stressed at
the debate that the lower costs of goods
would increase demand and boost sales
in addition to most government tax
collections.
“Every nation that has outlived the folly
of protection has acknowledged at length
that it was a losing system for them from
first to last,” Perry said.” We have had 11
different acts since 1861 and are already
threatened with another, and what could
we expect but losses from a system that
professes to be wiser than nature is?”
The United States, Perry argued in Boston’s Music Hall, raises less than $5 per
capita by its tariff, while England raises
over $4 without it.
Perry also criticized Greeley’s use of
the word, “protection.” While it sounds
good and is associated with security of
property, Perry noted, a look beneath the
word reveals that “restriction” describes it
more justly.
Perry also cited two classes of protectionists — “those who are measurably
honest and those who are measurably
dishonest…”
“The unscrupulous men get a big profit
on the products in which they are interested,” he suggested. They besiege the
Committee of Ways and Means, “organize
lobbies, make combinations and extort by
their display of grasping selfishness.”
He quoted one “distinguished” late
member of that committee: “If anything
will make a man a free trader, it is to sit on
this committee. There have been before us
during the session just closed at least 500
men who wished us to lay on increased
protective duties, with no intent in the
world but to increase the price of their
product, and thus rob the public.”
Perry, according to the Boston Daily
Evening Transcript, said he stood with
New England and with the ultimate earlier
free trader, Daniel Webster. Webster was
the Massachusetts statesmen and orator
who opposed the protective tariff from
1816 to 1824. “Alas, a piddling system
of interference with private rights virtually prohibits your building ships and
expressly prohibits your buying them,”
Perry said. “Shall this system last? The
young men of the country, especially the
educated young men, are almost unanimously against it.”
Greeley was introduced by the mayor to
vigorous applause, but evidently had little
preparation, the newspaper reported. He
immediately refuted Perry’s criticism, citing the significant support he had in both
hemispheres. Greeley argued that former
slave owners are those who support the
elimination of protective tariffs. Former
slave-owning Southern Democrats, he
said, sought to buy the labor in the cheapest market — Africa — before administrations invoked protective tariffs.
To the charge of special interests lobbying the House Ways and Means Committee, Greeley countered that Perry forgot that
foreign manufacturers also use lobbyists.
Greeley stated that Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of the
Treasury, said that the widespread idea
that tariffs caused prices to rise was erroneous. Rather, the ultimate tendency was
to permanently reduce prices.
Foreign manufacturers have significantly cheaper shipping costs than, for
example, US farmers shipping in return,
Greeley said. Protection results in industrial diversification and creates and maintains jobs.
“…The independence, the assured
greatness, the power and the wealth of this
people depend on such an adaptation of
our duties on imports that will insure their
symmetrical development of the industry
of the country,” Greeley bellowed.
In 1872, Greeley, who had supported
Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential bid four
years earlier, turned against him and
ran for President as the liberal Republican candidate. With support from some
Democrats, he campaigned aggressively
against the Grant administration, but lost
overwhelmingly. He died on November
29 — before the electoral college votes had
even been counted.
Perry retired from Williams College in
1891 and acted as a consultant to the governors of Vermont, Massachusetts, New
Hampshire and Connecticut before his
death in 1905.
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