Trade agreements in ’60s created has-been communities
In one of the stories looking back on the life of New York representative Louise Slaughter, who died recently, note was taken of a comment she made to Bill Clinton after he took over the negotiations with Mexico and Canada that resulted in the North American Free Trade Act, a measure first championed by Clinton’s Republican predecessor: “Why are you carrying George Bush’s trash?”
Slaughter represented a portion of upstate New York that was a haven for heavy industry.
The late John Dent, a Democrat like both Clinton and Slaughter, would have understood where the congresswoman was coming from.
Dent, who represented Westmoreland County in Washington for two decades beginning in 1958, was an exasperated critic of a succession of administrations for lowering trade barriers and for other measures which tended to expose U.S. companies and workers to the vagaries of international commerce.
Dent, who looked out for the interests of Jeannette and Latrobe and similar manufacturing hubs across the country as chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on Labor, failed to stem the free trade tide in his time.
And while it’s generally difficult to know how the dear departed would react to contemporary events, in Dent’s case it is not hard to imagine him railing against the elimination of a significant number of protectionist measures in the past several decades, starting with NAFTA in the 1990s.
John Dent thought the Kennedy administration was crazy for cozying up to the Europeans and Japanese on matters of trade. He probably would have thought the Clinton, the Obama and the two Bush administrations were out of their minds. He likely would have applauded the move by the Trump administration to impose U.S. sanctions on foreign steel and aluminum entering the country.
Dent heard often from the likes of Latrobe Steel. Pretty typical was it objecting to a 1961 measure to lower trade barriers and customs duties on steel tool products. “Already badly injured by foreign imports,” the firm’s J.P. Gill asked Dent to help stop “this tariff act as now written.”
The following year an Inland Steel executive begged for help for the stainless steel industry, which he said faced dire times in the event of the passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, that year’s top legislative priority for the Kennedy administration.
Dent, in his reply, called the measure, without evident hyperbole, “the greatest mistake of our times.”
Efforts to kill or amend the measure faced formidable difficulties, Dent said. Underscoring the foreign policy dimensions of the trade act, he noted “the State Department, the Japanese, French, Germans and Belgians” would be hard to face down.
Around this time, President Kennedy himself said, “The two great Atlantic markets will either grow together or grow apart… That decision will either mark the beginning of a new chapter in the alliance of free nations or a threat to the growth of western unity.”
“Our whole economy must be reviewed from the viewpoint of trade, the affect of (foreign?) aid on trade, and the effects of both on jobs,” Dent wrote Inland Steel in Chicago.
And this was in 1962!
From Dent’s perspective, things only grew worse in the following eight years, when he asked Richard Nixon to intervene on behalf of sheet glass manufacturing, one of the centers of which was in Jeannette and Arnold.
In a February 1970 letter to Nixon signed by a bipartisan cross-section of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation (24 of 27 members), Dent took note of the downward spiral of sheet glass employment following the Johnson administration’s “elimination of the escape clause rates” on several categories of sheet glass.
Dent linked the rule changes to the layoff in September 1969 of 600 sheet glass workers in Arnold and “sharply reduced” numbers at the Jeannette sheet glass plant.
All told, Dent said, since 1964, the plants had shed some 1,323 jobs “amidst a rising tide of imports.”
A White House aide promised that President Nixon would give the the congressman’s views “most careful consideration” when weighing whether to increase sheet glass tariffs.
It is not certain how the Nixon administration ultimately responded, though it is clear that the free trade movement picked up steam in the years ahead. Louise Slaughter’s nemesis, Nafta, is but one example.
Today, places like Jeannette are hollowed out wrecks. Consigned to a sad corner of U.S. manufacturing history, they are what John Dent feared they would become: has-been communities.
More on John Dent and the conundrum of trade next week.
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.