Smuggler Nation (3 page)

A focus on smuggling also gives us a rather different perspective on the American Industrial Revolution. Conveniently forgotten in today’s intellectual property protection debates is that early U.S. leaders such as Alexander Hamilton enthusiastically encouraged intellectual piracy and technology smuggling during the country’s initial industrialization process, especially in the textile industry. Such smuggling also depended on the illicit importation of skilled workers (in violation of British emigration laws) to assemble, operate, and improve on the latest machinery. The most famous British artisan to illegally move to America was Samuel Slater—credited as the “father of the American industrial revolution”—who was then hired to work on and perfect smuggled cotton-spinning machinery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Only much later, once it was a major industrial power, did the United States become a forceful advocate for intellectual property protection. In other words, the message to China and other countries today is, “do as I say, not as I did.”

Similarly, the standard story of westward expansion reads a bit differently when retold through the narrative of smuggling. As we will see, the West was won not only through military conquest but also through illicit commerce. Many nineteenth-century Americans interpreted Manifest Destiny to include a divine right to smuggle. The American frontier was a smuggling frontier. Smugglers of all sorts and smuggling of all types were at the forefront of the nation’s aggressive territorial expansion (by the mid-nineteenth century, the United States purchased or conquered almost 900 million acres of new land). This
ranged from large-scale smuggling of alcohol into Indian country—in violation of federal law—to trade for much-coveted furs, to illicit slave importing for the rapidly expanding cotton plantations of the Deep South. Westward expansion also included the mass movement of illegal settlers and squatters—the “illegal immigrants” of their time—who unlawfully moved to and settled on federal, Indian, and Mexican lands, often provoking violent confrontations. Weak government enforcement made such illicit frontier activities possible, and the extension and strengthening of the government’s reach in turn often pushed these activities further outward to the new edges of the frontier. These borderland dynamics came at the expense of a decaying Spanish empire, a newly independent Mexico, and ever-shrinking Indian lands. In this sense, frontier smugglers were America’s first pioneers, helping to lay the groundwork for territorial expansion and annexation.

The prevalence of smuggling throughout American history also complicates the image of the United States as a champion of free trade. After all, in a truly free-trade world there would be no smuggling. In one form or another, we have always imposed restrictions on cross-border economic flows, and these restrictions have created all sorts of incentives and opportunities for smuggling. In a sense, then, smugglers are the real free trader pioneers, relentlessly pushing the frontiers of commerce and challenging any and all trade obstacles in their way. No wonder, then, that Adam Smith was such an admirer of smugglers—they were at the forefront of breaking down rigid trade barriers. He viewed a smuggler as “a person who, though no doubt highly blamable for violating the laws of his country, is frequently incapable of violating those of natural justice, and would have been, in every respect, an excellent citizen, had not the laws of his country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so.”
⁵

But while America happily subverted British mercantilism through smuggling in the eighteenth century and denounced the Crown’s anti-smuggling efforts, as a newly industrializing country, it rejected free trade and imposed high tariffs in the nineteenth century—prompting widespread evasion via smuggling. Smuggling was further fueled when the United States increasingly imposed not just tariffs but prohibitions, with eradication rather than regulation the official goal. And this created new smuggling incentives and opportunities, ranging from illicitly
imported slaves and Chinese laborers to outlawed pornography and condoms, to banned booze and drugs.

Conventional notions about American government are also challenged when smuggling is introduced into the story. The standard story is of an America defined by a minimalist and unobtrusive central government for much of its early history.
⁶
But this image of a disengaged, hands-off state doesn’t really fit with the everyday experience of those who were involved in international commerce. When it came to regulating trade—and therefore policing smuggling—the reach and presence of the state was very real in the form of the local customhouse and customs collector.
⁷

The new federal government’s constitutional right to regulate commerce was the cornerstone of its authority and provided a key mechanism for expanding its policing powers. Indeed, the regulation and policing of trade was a driving motivation to create a central state apparatus in the first place. Concerns about smuggling prompted government growth from the start, with the establishment of a customs service and its revenue cutters as a core component of the federal bureaucracy. Attempts to suppress maritime piracy and embargo busting also sparked the early development of the country’s naval forces. Illicit trade and related activities therefore not only challenged but also empowered the new American state.
⁸

So even though warfare and welfare are typically viewed as the main drivers of big government,
Smuggler Nation
highlights another motor: increased government size, presence, and coercive powers via the policing of smuggling. Consider, for example, the transformation of ports of entry. This began with an almost exclusive focus on seaports, but it later added land ports and then extended to airports and even cyberports. As the mechanisms and locations of border crossings (both licit and illicit) have diversified and expanded, so too has policing—including reaching well beyond the nation’s borders through cross-border police cooperation, international agreements, deploying agents abroad, and so on.
⁹

Equally important, such border policing began with revenue collection as its core mission, but over time this increasingly expanded to immigration controls and enforcing prohibitions—greatly adding to the pressures on federal law enforcement. A closer look at smuggling and anti-smuggling campaigns therefore also gives us insight into the
changing role and expectations of government in American society. This shift from an almost exclusive focus on the imperative of revenue collection to a much broader mandate of keeping out “undesirable” people and things has often been entangled in the highly charged politics of moral panics and crusades.
¹⁰
Moreover, there has often been a built-in dynamic of escalation in which increased law enforcement stimulates more organized, sophisticated, and geographically dispersed smuggling, prompting calls for even more intensive and expansive enforcement. Regardless of their effectiveness and sometimes counterproductive consequences, such enforcement crackdowns have often proven politically popular for their symbolic value in projecting an image of government authority and resolve.

The end result is that alongside the welfare state and the traditional national security state we also have seen the rise and growth of a formidable policing state, with both inward-and outward-looking faces. And as some smuggling issues have come to be redefined as security issues, we also see a blurring of law enforcement and national security missions—nowhere more apparent than in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (the largest reorganization of the federal government in half a century) and the proliferation of military hardware and technologies for anti-smuggling tasks along the nation’s borders.

As we now turn to look in more detail at the role of smuggling and anti-smuggling campaigns in shaping the course of American history, it is useful to ponder some “what if” questions. For instance: What if the British had continued to tolerate rather than crack down on illicit trade in their American colonies? Would the colonies still have rebelled? And what if the rebellious colonies had failed to obtain gunpowder and other supplies through smuggling channels before France formally intervened? Would the British have won? What if the newborn country had not been able to illicitly acquire British technologies and skilled workers? Would America’s early industrialization have been derailed? What if local communities on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border during the War of 1812 had been more interested in fighting instead of illicitly trading (including feeding British troops in Canada with smuggled American beef)? Would the war have lasted so long and ended in a stalemate?

Equally provocative counterfactuals can be asked about other major nineteenth-century episodes and developments. What if bootleggers and fur traders had not flooded Indian lands with illicit rum and whiskey in violation of the federal ban? Would Native American populations have been so easily and quickly pacified and displaced without “white man’s wicked water” as a deadly lubricant? What if the foreign slave trade had not been able to rely on American slavers, American-built and -outfitted slave ships, and the American flag (all prohibited by U.S. law) to defy the British warships policing the trade? What if the Confederacy had been unable to illicitly export cotton to fund illicit imports of arms and other war materials? What if the Union blockade of Confederate ports had been more effective in stopping blockade runners? Would the Civil War have been so long and bloody? What if contraband contraceptives had not been so widely available in the last decades of the century? Would the country’s birthrate still have fallen as much as it did?

Moving into the twentieth century: What if rumrunners and gangsters had not made such a mockery of Prohibition and kept dry America wet? Would alcohol still be illegal? And what if drugs such as cocaine, opium, and cannabis had never been criminalized? What would our criminal justice system look like without drug prohibition? What if American agribusiness and other sectors of the economy had not had such easy access to a large, cheap, and compliant pool of unauthorized migrant workers during the past century? What would the economic and demographic profile of the country look like in the absence of such large-scale evasion of immigration laws? Readers should keep these sorts of questions in mind in the chapters ahead.
¹¹

There is nothing uniquely American about smuggling, of course.
¹²
To varying degrees and in varying ways, all nations are smuggler nations. Indeed, some have even been smuggler empires; consider, for instance, the crucial role of opium smuggling in financing the British Empire in the nineteenth century. No so-called drug cartel today comes remotely close to matching the power of the British East India Company, which enjoyed a near monopoly on the China opium-smuggling trade in its heyday.

In a sense, then, this book is the story of just one case out of many—but a particularly prominent and important one. What makes the U.S. experience so striking is that not only has the country had such an
intimate relationship with smuggling since before its founding, but today it has the distinction of being the world’s leading importer of smuggled goods and labor (given its sheer size and wealth) and simultaneously the world’s leading anti-smuggling campaigner. It is also a leading smuggling source country, if one considers all the smuggled American guns, cigarettes, pirated software and entertainment, hazardous waste, and dirty dollars circulating around the globe.

Today, America’s policing spirit and illicit entrepreneurial spirit continue to thrive and coexist. We have built a vast anti-smuggling policing bureaucracy with global reach, and partly thanks to the war on drugs we also have the largest prison population on earth. At the same time, the business of smuggling never seems to lack new recruits. Barriers to entry, as economists would say, remain low. Amateur smugglers can even order “how to” books at a discount on Amazon, with titles such as
Duty Free: Smuggling Made Easy
and
Sneak It Through: Smuggling Made Easier
.
¹³
There are books with smuggling tips tailored especially for aspiring drug traffickers, among them
I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons
.
¹⁴
And if one wishes to also produce the drugs, there are popular books on this as well—
Marijuana Growers Handbook
and
Marijuana Horticulture
are listed as top sellers in the Amazon categories of “gardening and horticulture” and “crop science.”
¹⁵
Although not nearly as profitable as smuggling itself, writing user guides for wannabe smugglers is certainly less risky. For that matter, so, too, is writing a book about the history of smuggling in America.

PART I
THE COLONIAL ERA