Smuggler Nation (2 page)

Writing this book was very much a collective endeavor, even if only one name appears on the cover. It was made possible by the generosity of Brown University, especially the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Department of Political Science, and a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award. I gave presentations based on the book at Harvard University, MIT, Brown University, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the U.S. Naval War College, Stanford University, Connecticut College, Bates College, Pomona College, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the University of London, as well as at the annual conferences of the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Chapter 14
draws from Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas,
Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial
(University of California Press, 1996);
Chapter 15
draws from Peter Andreas,
Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide
(Cornell University Press, 2nd ed., 2009); and
Chapter 16
draws from Peter Andreas, “Illicit Globalization: Myths, Misconceptions, and Historical Lessons,”
Political Science Quarterly
(fall 2011), adapted with permission.

Many thanks to my able research assistants who helped me enormously at various stages of the project: Angelica Duran Martinez, Patrick Endress, Sol Eppel, Forrest Miller, Jack Mizerak, Michael Skocpol, Emma Tennant, and Aaron Weinstein. Mark Blyth, Bill Frucht, Roger Haydon, Jim Ron, Joyce Seltzer, and Ken Sharpe gave me valuable input when the book was little more than a rough draft of a proposal. Joel Andreas, Richard Bensel, Nitsan Chorev, Rich Friman, Cathy Lutz, Tom Naylor, Herman Schwartz, and Rich Snyder read all or parts of the book manuscript and gave me much-needed feedback. Jim Morone was a supportive voice from the start; his commitment to scholarship aimed at a broader audience beyond narrow disciplinary confines is refreshing and all too rare. I especially appreciate his encouraging my trespassing into the study of American political development.

I cannot say enough good things about Dave McBride, my editor at Oxford University Press, who embraced the idea of doing this book even before I had written a single word. And when I sent him chapter drafts he showed that some editors still actually edit. Dave also generated reviewer reports at record speed, both on the initial book proposal and the manuscript. The helpful comments from these external readers certainly improved the final version. I’m also grateful to my agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who taught me much about the world of books. My biggest thanks (as always) go to Jasmina, for tolerating my scholarly obsessions more than she should and distracting me from them as often as she could.

Peter Andreas, Providence, Rhode Island

SMUGGLER
NATION

INTRODUCTION
A Nation of Smugglers

THE AGENTS MOVED IN
to seize the illicit shipment, but the traffickers turned on them, shooting the senior officer and torching his vehicle. With the local courts hopelessly compromised and corrupt, the outraged authorities wanted to extradite the perpetrators of the brazen crime. But this only made them more defiant and violent, and they were never caught or prosecuted.

This may sound like Tijuana or Juarez in recent years, or Medellín not so long ago. But the year was 1772, and the place was near my adopted hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The ringleader of the attack, John Brown—a prominent local merchant whose business interests included smuggling, privateering, and slave trading—was one of the founders of the university that bears his name (and that happens to be my employer). The famous incident came to be known as the
Gaspee
Affair, in which a British customs vessel, the HMS
Gaspee
, was stormed, looted, and torched late at night by an armed group of local citizens in retaliation for cracking down on their illicit trade. The tiny colonial outpost had long been a notorious smuggling hub, greatly advantaged by the geography of Narragansett Bay.

Today, this historical episode is so celebrated by local residents that they put on an annual festival, Gaspee Days, and proudly point to it as Rhode Island’s opening salvo in sparking the American Revolution.
A plaque on South Main Street near downtown Providence, a short walk from where I live, commemorates the event. Gaspee Street is also a few blocks away. Of course, most Americans no longer have such a sanguine view of illicit trade, and U.S. officials, like the frustrated British imperial authorities before them, are increasingly preoccupied with fighting it.

In this book I reexamine the history of America as a battle over smuggling, from evading tariffs and embargoes to violating prohibitions and immigration controls. Focusing on the smuggling of goods and people, the book tells the story of how these illicit flows—and the campaigns to police them—defined and shaped the nation. As we’ll see, smuggling has been a major force in the broader historical evolution of America: as a distant colonial outpost in the British empire (heavily involved in smuggling untaxed goods); as a developing nation partly based on slavery (including illicit slave trading) and clandestine importation of British machines and skilled workers; as an advanced capitalist industrial and agricultural economy built on the influx of migrant labor (legal and illegal); and as a highly urbanized economy and society increasingly geared toward personal consumption and pleasure (including smuggled porn, bootlegged booze, prohibited drugs, and pirated music). At the same time, battling these illicit trades has been a powerful motor in the development and expansion of the federal government, greatly extending its policing power at home and abroad.

An underlying dynamic I highlight throughout this book is how the state makes smuggling (through laws and their enforcement), and how smuggling in turn remakes the state.
¹
But this is not to imply a simple, mechanical interaction. There is nothing natural or automatic about it. Throughout American history we see the full range of state interactions with smuggling, from collusion and toleration to discouragement and condemnation. This is why politics is such a vital part of the story. After all, deciding which activities are labeled as smuggling in the first place is inherently political, and this has varied enormously across time and place. So too has the intensity, form, and focus of anti-smuggling efforts—drugs such as cocaine and cannabis, for example, were not even law enforcement concerns until the last century.

In other words, smuggling is not just about economics—market exchange, supply and demand, and so on. It is all that, of course, but
much more. Beyond the mechanics of illicit trade, it includes the morally charged politics of deviance and vice that is so often wrapped up in the issue of smuggling and the policing of smuggling. Here, politics, economics, and culture intersect and mix, often in explosive ways and with unanticipated and long-lasting repercussions for American society and America’s foreign relations.

Why retell the American story as a smuggling story? The reasons are many. One is simply that the big-picture story has never really been told in a sustained and focused way; up to now, we mostly have pieces and fragments.
²
Viewing American history through the lens of smuggling sheds new light on the dynamics of borders, foreign relations, government expansion, economic development, and societal transformation. It reveals that the oft-celebrated rise of American capitalism is also about contraband capitalism, including the creation of some of the country’s first family fortunes (America’s first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, was also America’s first multimillionaire smuggler).
³
It shows that the transformation of America into a consumer society is also very much about illicit mass consumption. It reminds us that the economic opening of borders has always been selective and incomplete. More broadly, it takes illicit economic activities such as smuggling out of the shadows and places them more front and center in examining U.S. and global politics.

Rereading the American experience through smuggling and anti-smuggling campaigns forces us to look more closely down the side streets, backstreets, and dark alleys of our economic history, not just at what is happening on Main Street and Wall Street (and even here there is sometimes a smuggling connection). This is of course not meant to suggest that everything can simply be reduced to smuggling. But smuggling is too often hidden and out of sight in the conventional narrative of the American epic.

Perhaps the most important reason to tell this story is to inject a strong dose of historical perspective into today’s overheated policy debates about securing borders and fighting global crime. Political appeals to “regain control” of the nation’s borders are afflicted by an extreme case of historical amnesia, nostalgically implying there was once a time when our borders were actually “under control.” This is pure myth; there never was a golden age of secure borders. Smuggling
and state making in America grew up together. To be sure, it has often been an antagonistic relationship. But far more than is typically acknowledged, it has also been an interdependent and even symbiotic relationship (sometimes unintentionally so).

Smuggler Nation
tells the long and complicated story of this double-edged relationship. In doing so, the book provides a corrective of sorts to today’s overly alarmist depictions of the illicit dark side of globalization as an entirely new and unprecedented threat to America and the world. These popularized accounts of a booming illicit global economy overstate its contemporary novelty and overlook its historical significance.
⁴
For centuries, smuggling has enriched and subverted empires, shaped patterns of global trade, and fueled wars. As the American experience shows, the same illicit commercial activities that are today viewed as besieging borders, undermining legitimate business, and spreading violence and corruption were instrumental in the country’s birth, economic development, and geographic expansion. It is therefore perhaps more than a little ironic that a country made by smuggling has now become the world’s leading anti-smuggling crusader. Although America’s founders rebelled against the policing of illicit trade, and illicit trade helped to create and develop the nation, illicit trade today increasingly frustrates the federal government’s policing ambitions.

As the chapters that follow emphasize, the American story reads rather differently when reread as a smuggling story. And this is not simply a detour to obscure places, events, and characters. It includes watershed episodes in American history. Take, for instance, the War of Independence. In many respects, the rebellion was a backlash against the militarized British crackdown on illicit trade. Colonial merchants were leading players in the Atlantic smuggling economy—most notably the smuggling of West Indies molasses to New England distilleries—and conflicts over smuggling and overzealous British customs enforcement played a critical role in the tensions leading up to the outbreak of war. Intensified British policing of clandestine commerce in the decade prior to the Revolution provoked mob riots, burning of customs vessels, and tarring and feathering of customs agents and informants. Pivotal incidents and protests, such as the Boston Tea Party, were closely connected to smuggling interests. It is perhaps appropriate that the first signer
of the Declaration of Independence was Boston’s most well-known merchant-smuggler, John Hancock.

Smugglers also put their illicit transportation methods, skills, and networks to profitable use by covertly supplying George Washington’s troops with desperately needed arms and gunpowder. Motivated as much by profit as patriotism, they also served as privateers for Washington’s makeshift naval force. And as we will see, this was just one of a number of major American military conflicts in which success on the battlefield was tied to entrepreneurial success in the underworld of smuggling. Smuggling and war fighting went hand in hand, from trading with the enemy in the War of 1812 to blockade running during the American Civil War.