A nation of smugglers and protectionists: Americans have always limited trade--and always defied those limits.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century - Book review

Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, by Andrew Wender Cohen, W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $27.95

As ARGUMENTS about trade agreements occupy the headlines yet again, the Syracuse University historian Andrew Wender Cohen has come along to put those debates in historical context. As Cohen's engaging book Contraband details, the American story has been filled with disagreements about how free trade should be, with outright efforts to discourage economic engagement with other countries at all, and with gleefully clever schemes to thwart those efforts illegally. Both limits on trade and the defiance of those limits are intimately tied up with America's concept of itself and Americans' understanding of patriotism. Especially through the 19th century, citizens clashed over whether respect for the national identity required strictly controlling passage across the borders or if it meant leaving them open.

The basic arguments have changed little in the past two centuries. One side invokes nationalism, higher wages, the cultivation of domestic industries, and a purported concern over the conditions of foreign labor. The other points to economic efficiency, lower prices, and the freedom to buy, sell, and choose as you please.

One man who helped people exercise that freedom to choose was Charley Lawrence, whose story threads through Contraband. Billed upon his peaceful death at home in 1890 as the "King of the Smugglers," Lawrence was a confidant of Boss Tweed, a cousin to the poet whose verse is inscribed inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and an importer of much of the fine silk brought into the country in defiance of America's prohibitive tariffs. After Lawrence was arrested and extracted from his refuge in Britain (smuggling was not an extraditable offense, so the U.S. government lied about the charges), the prominent economist David A. Wells publicly compared him to John Hancock, the founding patriot who had made a fortune ignoring British trade restrictions.

Smuggling goods past despised customs collectors was, in fact, a celebrated occupation during the colonial and revolutionary period. That early embrace of the swashbuckling outlaw speeding goods across the border lives on in the culture in the form of fictional heroes like Han Solo. We may forever wrestle over the policies that create them, but we always seem to love our smugglers.

After independence, the new republic became more nationalist and protectionist...