U.S. trade: Something went off the tracks
“Something must be done and done fast to save the specialty steel industry in this country … Specialty steel is a very vulnerable target” for foreign steelmakers hoping to crash the U.S. market. In the absence of U.S. government controls on foreign specialty steel imports, it is ” highly questionable whether our industry can survive.”
The letter from Latrobe Steel’s David P. Hughes was posted Nov. 3, 1970, to congressman John Dent, long the leading protectionist voice on Capitol Hill.
Dent of Westmoreland County, a former local union official, had been waging an often lonely war against foreign-made steel, aluminum and glass entering the U.S. His worry: the disruption of long-established domestic markets and the loss of thousands of American jobs.
For better than a decade he had been pushing back hard on efforts to lower U.S. trade barriers.
Dent represented communities of the industrial heartland — Jeannette, Latrobe, and Arnold. But he reached far beyond these in his struggle to preserve American industries and jobs: his collection of papers at the Westmoreland County Historical Society contains letters he exchanged with Hollywood producers protesting the use of foreign locales and actors, for instance, for the 1962 film “The Longest Day.”
Dent, relevant today as the Trump administration places import restrictions on steel, aluminum and other products coming into the country from friends (Canada) and foes (China) alike, thought he had hit on a formula that would work without resort to the controversies surrounding the lowering or raising of tariffs.
It was so simple, Dent told Crucible Steel’s Blair Bolles, that a person with an 8th-grade math skill could figure it out. It involved linking loss of employment to levels of imports, so that every percentage loss of unemployment would trigger a percentage cut in imports, for the particular industrial category involved.
“The real culprit,” Dent explained, “is the amount of production consumed” per country. “The fact that the consumer pays less for an imported product does not … determine the amount of injury to the (U.S.) job market. It is the volume of product consumed …”
Dent was convinced that by allowing non-consuming nations, such as Haiti, a nation he had recently visited, to export to the United States, workers in those countries were being relegated to the status of slave laborers.
“We are endangering their economic welbeing” as well as our own “by allowing them to create a product based on” exports “rather than based upon reasonable consumption within their own country,” he said.
“We are digging a grave not only for ourselves” but for them as well, Dent argued.
As for those responsible for the “trade debacle,” Dent blamed the foreign policy boys at the State Department.
The fact that U.S. trade policy since World War II has had a large and expansive foreign relations component is well documented.
On his blog, the Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently offered that post-war U.S. trade policies fostered “a real if hard-to-measure contribution to (worldwide) democratic governance and world peace.”
“Free trade is good,” Krugman wrote, and “globilization,” Donald Trump not withstanding, has not “decimated the American working class.”
If Krugman was in push back mode, so was Richard Haas, a Republican foreign policy expert, who recently noted “the rise of populism (read Trump) is in part a response to stagnating incomes and job loss, owing mostly to new technologies but widely attributed to imports and immigrants.”
Haas faulted Trump for bowing out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks and forcing Mexico and Canada to the table to renegotiate NAFTA to America’s advantage.
With America in retreat, Haas predicts “a world less free, less prosperous, less peaceful.” His conclusion : “‘America First’ and the liberal world order” built by American statecraft since World War II “seem incompatible.”
Something went off the tracks for America’s blue collar workers, once the backbone of Dent’s Democratic Party — some combination of trade policies, technology and automation, schooling, and the failure of politics (in addition to Democratic negligence, the Republican message urging coal miners to embrace their “heritage” is an example of the political games that have been played with people’s lives).
The world John Dent railed against is today a grim reality for millions of Americans and for scores of communities struggling in the backwash of a post-industrial U.S. economy. In this respect, at least, Dent’s warnings look prophetic.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.