Buy American?
Exploring an alternative politics of trade with Dana Frank
by Jane Slaughter

What rules should govern the flow of goods from one society to another? The "free trade"/"fair trade" debate has raged for decades. Labor historian Dana Frank is intrigued by the "Buy American" campaigns that have won so many working-class enthusiasts. Perhaps the apex was the spectacle, in the 1980s, of local unions in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Alabama selling their members the chance to take a sledgehammer to a Toyota. Using economic arguments that sound credible on one level, "Buy American" crusades promote a self-righteous nationalism that spills over into jingoism.

Frank’s book Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, argues that protectionism and "free trade" are not the only choices for economic relationships between countries; she proposes an alternative politics of trade based on working people’s common interests.

Jane Slaughter: What got you interested in the "Buy American" movement?

Dana Frank: I was thinking about writing a book about the history of the union label. There’s a long history, that starts in the 1870s, of goods and services being marked as having been produced by union workers. People might remember restaurants carrying a sign that said "Union House." Or the TV campaign from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, in the 1970s, with the workers singing that catchy little song: "Look for the union label …"

But I realized that by the 1980s the union label had mutated into "Buy American." It had lost the class dimension and became nationalism instead. I was interested in how that happened, and I wanted to write for ordinary people about difficult issues of trade and globalization and make it acceptable from people’s own starting point–-because we’ve all thought about whether "Buy American" would save jobs.

I had also always been interested in anti-Asian racism, because in California I grew up with Asian Americans and knew what they had gone through and my family hadn’t.

Jane Slaughter: There is a movement that says we should try to keep our economic interactions closer to home, both to avoid spending so much on transportation and to encourage community. But you see "Buy American" as different. What’s the logic behind "Buy American"?

Dana Frank: When we think about Buy American campaigns, we need to think about "What’s the goal we’re trying to achieve?" The economic logic seems clear: we buy goods made in the U.S., and then the manufacturers will take the money they make from that and reinvest it in the U.S. And union folks, especially, want that to be reinvested in good union jobs. We’re trying to create some kind of national community, and we’re trying to say, "We want good jobs to be sustained within the U.S."

The problem with that logic is that while we’re trying to make a deal with nation-based capital, the money the companies are making is being invested overseas as fast as it can, because the profit rates are higher and labor costs are often lower. Often foreign-made goods are cheaper because they’re the product of exploited workers.

So while we think we’re in some kind of partnership with nation-based capital – while they’re waving the flag – they’re taking their money and investing it overseas.

A good example is General Motors. General Motors is investing in Brazil and China and all over the world with the money that it might make selling cars in the U.S. They’re looking for the highest rates of return; they’re not looking to sustain community in the U.S.

So what happens is that we end up in alliances with the very corporations that are causing the problem we’re trying to solve. We end up with the wrong friends, and at the same time we end up with the wrong enemies. We end up seeing workers in other countries as undermining us and as somehow our enemy, when we should be thinking of working people in other countries as our allies.

Jane Slaughter: It seems that Buy American is often a sentiment that comes from the grassroots. It’s not just something that’s manipulated by the media or by corporate spinmasters. Why do people tend to jump on "foreigners" as their first explanation for what’s wrong, and to economic nationalism as their first solution?

Dana Frank: One reason is that it seems like a path to democratic control of the economy. It seems like the way that we can be empowered to use our consumer dollars and create the good society.

And part of the reason is that we don’t have a lot of other alternatives. We’re alienated from the mainstream political parties. Both the Democrats and Republicans support free trade. Neither one is supporting the labor movement the way they should, since they’re both largely corporate-controlled parties. So we’re stymied at that end, and often the trade union leadership is not offering us a way to have democratic control of our unions and to use our unions the way we would like to use them. And so people are looking for a way to feel powerful in relation to huge global forces that are dragging down our communities.

Jane Slaughter: It ends up making strange bedfellows, but if a Buy American campaign was in fact able to increase consumption of U.S.-made goods, and somehow did increase, in some small measure, the number of jobs that were needed to produce those goods in the U.S. – don’t people have the right to try to protect their own jobs, especially if they’re higher-paying and it seems like the only people benefiting from imports are the owners of corporations?

Dana Frank: First of all, the first part of your question just isn’t going to happen, because the cat’s out of the bag with globalization. All the trade agreements and federal policies, like NAFTA and now the Free Trade Area of the Americas, are greasing the wheels for that money to go outside the U.S.

The second problem is when we start identifying "us vs. them." When that’s defined geographically, it sets up people in foreign countries as the enemy. You start drawing these circles of who is the "us" and who is the "them," and historically, again and again that line is defined in racial and anti-immigrant terms. So then you have this notion of a white, native-born "we" that’s being protected from "them."

With the way the economy exists, we can’t go backward. We have to acknowledge that there are transnational corporations, there are institutionalized trade systems–we have to fight them, but we also have to think of people outside our borders as our allies and comrades rather than as the people we’re fighting against.

Jane Slaughter: We have to think about transnational solutions because transnationalism is here to stay.

Dana Frank: Yes. We can’t make it go away. And there’s also this very tricky question of "what’s our community?" Is our community defined in geographic terms? Is it defined in ethnic terms? Is it defined in national terms? We are not going to get it about the way the world is structured if we don’t start thinking of "our community" in class terms.

Jane Slaughter: It seems like Americans are so quick to jump to "American" as the community that they identify with. Why is that?

Dana Frank: Like in many countries, there’s a long history of nationalism that goes along with nation-states. And historically, in the U.S., it’s also tied in with the U.S. desire to dominate the world, and the sense of arrogance that we’re the best country in the world, or we have the only real democratic country in the world, and therefore we know what’s best for the rest of the world. Since September 11 people are understandably scared, but the question is, again, does that mean that we fall back on the sort of "we" that says "we should dominate the world"? I believe that means landing right back into alliances with transnational corporations that are creating the same problems we’re trying to fight against, like Lockheed Martin [Marietta]. These huge military contractors were running patriotic ads with flags in The New York Times within days of September 11, and they have a tremendous stake in militarization.

These corporations are waving the flag, but that’s just greasing the skids to go overseas as fast as they can. They are backing agreements like the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or trying to give Bush "fast-track" authority, precisely so that they can leave the country.

Jane Slaughter: The language used in Buy American campaigns has often been that of "invasion." How does that contribute to the emotional tone of the campaigns?

Dana Frank: There’s a whole set of language: not only invasion, but "flood." The flood of foreign products. People can watch for that kind of language in the press; it goes back to the notion of the "yellow peril" which was first promoted at the turn of the century. It also ties in with the notion that Pat Buchanan is pushing–that white people in the U.S. are being engulfed by people of color and immigrants. It’s always a tidal wave-invasion-flood metaphor, that somehow we’re being taken over. And of course the "we" that we’re constructing is white.

Jane Slaughter: Can you say more about how racism has been thoroughly intertwined with Buy American campaigns?

Dana Frank: There have been three big phases of Buy American campaigns. The first was during the American Revolution, with the non-importation agreements and the Boston Tea Party. But the second and much bigger wave was in the 1930s. A lot of it was sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul. That campaign attacked both foreign goods and foreign workers. An imported product was seen as the product of foreign workers, who were dangerous whether they were in the U.S. or whether they were somewhere else. Hearst promoted the concept of "the yellow peril" – that Asians were about to take over the U. S., and that both their products and the people should be purged.

Most people are familiar with the Buy American campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. You saw a resurgence of every stereotype in the book against Asians, and the notion that Japanese capital was taking over the U.S. You saw the equation of Japanese goods with Pearl Harbor –

Jane Slaughter: I remember the United Auto Workers used phrases like "the Japanese are savaging our market." Our market.

Dana Frank: Again, who is the "our," the "we"? And there were references to sneaky Asians, the various inscrutable Orientals – all these stereotypes that have been around since the late 19th century.

At some level there’s a notion that it is not legitimate for Asian people, whether it’s Japan or China, to be a viable economic competitor. And so racism is trotted out the minute there’s any kind of economic power in Asia that is somehow seen as a viable competitor to the U.S. Especially with China as a growing economic power now, I think we’re about to have the Cold War again, this time using the "yellow peril." You saw it when the Chinese captured the U.S. spy plane in the spring of 2001. People were calling up the Ethnic Studies Center at the University of Oregon and saying that all people of Chinese descent should be interned. There was a resurgence of every stereotype in the book.

The latest manifestation of Buy American is that since September 11th there’s been a huge resurgence of nationalism and patriotism and corporate-sponsored nationalist campaigns. There’s certainly been a lot of nationalism in ad campaigns – that you should buy a Chevrolet because of September 11th, for example.

Jane Slaughter: Because a Chevrolet is the most all-American car!

Dana Frank: Somehow, that would stop terrorism. There’s a shameless willingness to manipulate nationalism and people’s fears in order to support the corporate agenda. And there has been a resurgence of desire to buy American, but the economy is so transnational and mixed up now that it’s almost impossible anyway, precisely because of this long-term restructuring that we call globalization.

Jane Slaughter: What reactions have you had to your book from working people?

Dana Frank: Most people have been excited by what it was saying, because they knew there was something wrong in the Buy American logic. They liked what I was saying – that it was time to move past the nationalist approach to trade issues.

Jane Slaughter is a freelance writer who specializes in labor issues.