The Economic Anxiety of the 1893 Tariff Debate
Washington's leading industries feared that a new trade bill would prioritize Eastern markets and force local businesses to lower wages to compete with international labor.
The story, cleaned up
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The new tariff bill proposed by the Democratic members of the ways and means committee was the general subject of discussion in the city yesterday, and its provisions were condemned on all sides as striking a deadly blow at the principal industries of Washington. An analysis of them shows that the bill, if it should ever become law, would throw the coal miners of this state into direct competition with the Chinese and Japanese of British Columbia; would open the Eastern markets to the great untouched belts of cedar and fir in that province and to the white pine of the Eastern provinces, bringing them into direct competition with the just reviving lumber and shingle industry of Puget Sound; would force the wool growers of Eastern Washington to compete with a deluge of imported wool from Australia, South Africa and Asia; and would dash the last hope of the development of the great deposits of iron ore found in this state by letting in the more accessible ores of British Columbia and a flood of pig and finished iron from Great Britain.
“It makes us hewers of wood and drawers of water for the East.”
In 1893, Washington's industries were deeply vulnerable to global trade shifts, much like today’s trade-dependent economy. The rhetoric of the era reflects a familiar anxiety about being reduced to 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' for the interests of larger, distant markets.
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