Contraband
Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
How skirting the law once defined America’s relation to the world.
In the frigid winter of 1875, Charles L. Lawrence made international headlines when he was arrested for smuggling silk worth $60 million into the United States. An intimate of Boss Tweed, gloriously dubbed “The Prince of Smugglers,” and the head of a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, Lawrence scandalized a nation whose founders themselves had once dabbled in contraband.
Since the Revolution itself, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs on most imports. Protecting the nation was the custom house, which waged a “war on smuggling,” inspecting every traveler for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds, and art. The Civil War’s blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband, but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age, when characters like assassin Louis Bieral, economist “The Parsee Merchant,” Congressman Ben Butler, and actress Rose Eytinge tempted consumers with illicit foreign luxuries. Only as the United States became a global power with World War I did smuggling lose its scurvy romance.
Meticulously researched, Contraband explores the history of smuggling to illuminate the broader history of the United States, its power, its politics, and its culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cohen, a professor of history at Syracuse University, investigates the conflicted American relationship with smuggling, the center of a bitter debate between free trade vs. protectionism/high tariffs. His overwhelming focus is the Gilded Age (roughly 1865 1898), and he shows how smuggling and undervaluing imported goods was a widespread form of tax cheating in this era before income tax. Cohen introduces readers to a host of colorful characters, particularly Charley Lawrence, a notable smuggler and friend of Boss Tweed. Cohen illuminates the murky world of customs houses and inspectors, which pre-WWI "exceed the navy in size and might," and underscores the cultural context of high tariffs on luxury and other items, illustrating how they came to be seen as promoting such values as social equality, economic independence, and "American exceptionalism." Conversely, smuggling was often "associated with foreigners, Jews, Asians, and women," though it was also a " respectable crime' committed by upper-class whites." Despite a chapter on late 19th century American imperialism, which covers not contraband but the annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War, he fails to show how smuggling inaugurated "the American century." Still, this is a well-researched and well-written account of the underside of America's growth as an economic power.
