Kusch, Fritz

PhD Project: “The Defenders. The Popular Attempt to Uphold Protectionism in the United States, ca. 1880-1930” (working title)

This PhD project examines the popular agitation for protectionist tariff policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. Since the 1880s, a spectrum of various interest groups, industrial organization, public activists, and wealthy individuals formed, which attempted to defend the existing protectionist system of high import tariffs against free trade criticism and moderately protectionist reform attempts through popular agitation. This attempt was popular in the sense that it directly addressed the general public and ordinary people. To this end, political campaigns were routinely conducted, pamphlets and leaflets were distributed by the millions, speakers were trained, and a far-reaching set of protectionist press outlets was established. Important organizations included the American Protective Tariff League, the Boston Home Market Club, and the American Iron and Steel Association.
These popular manifestations of protectionist sentiment, which have, so far, not been studied in great detail, represent the object of analysis in the dissertation’s examination of the broader political culture of American protectionism. It investigates how popular protectionist organizations and activists attempted to establish protectionist positions within public political discourse, and how this succeeded in effectively blocking all efforts at tariff reform, which became increasingly urgent with the rapid industrial development of the United States.
The dissertation aims at a broad conceptualization of protectionism, understanding American protectionism as a genuinely political ideology that was not limited to material or economic considerations but consequently connected them to further ideological-political dispositions such as nationalism, exceptionalism, imperialism, and various forms of xenophobia. It is one of the basic assumptions of the project that explanatory approaches based on a narrow, purely economic conceptualization of protectionism overlook the broader political, cultural, and in part identity-forming aspects of protectionist ideology and thus are unsuitable to adequately explain American protectionism and its astonishing longevity. Ultimately, the project aims at a cultural and ideological underpinning of material-economic explanatory approaches – a "color version of political economy” as Frank Trentmann has described it for the British case.
The analysis of popular protectionist agitation also illustrates how protectionist activists took protectionism, a rather complex political issue that was quite far away from everyday life, and intentionally popularized it, i.e.,they processed, explained and also emotionalized it for a broader audience. Also, the project investigates how ordinary Americans perceived the intense tariff discussions of the late nineteenth century, how they made sense of them, participated in them, and connected them to their own lives. In this way, the dissertation follows a younger scholarship on the history of American democracy and examines the developing techniques of political agitation and early attempts to systematically influence public opinion, but also the rules of public political discourse which were renegotiated in the unfolding American mass democracy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This dissertation is part of the B11-project “Protectionism and Social Policy in the Americas, 1890-2020” of the CRC 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy”