“The beet sugar is better for the Aryan stomach and other digestive organs than the cane sugars of the tropics,” wrote the evocatively named (but pseudonymous) Junius Aryan. “The getting and using of cane sugars from the tropics … is unnatural,” he continued, “as the acids of the tropical cane sugars are more detrimental to Aryan stomachs … than the acids of beet sugars indigenous to the Aryan country.”Footnote ¹ Writing at the height of a sugar tariff debate raging in the US Congress, Aryan argued that sugar ought to have a high tariff in order to protect the digestion of the white race, a race which “would certainly be retarded in its civilization, if the climate and soil in its own North country” were unsuited to beet production. “Aryan statesmen” in Congress should not waste time debating whether to eliminate the sugar tariff since they obviously ought to promote sugar beet production in order to sustain civilization. Junius Aryan penned his screed, part of a pamphlet titled The Aryans and Mongrelized America: The Remedy, at a time when the new Democratic administration under President Woodrow Wilson proposed reduction and ultimate elimination of trade duties on sugar. Such a move faced large-scale resistance from defenders of the sugar beet industry in the United States, but the proposal also raised alarms among nativist white supremacists for whom the sugar tariff seemed to offer protection for more than just their digestion. The sugar tariff, together with stronger immigration restrictions, was necessary to protect the United States' racial sovereignty.

Aryan's theories about the climate and race echoed ideas long in circulation connecting beet sugar and civilization, ideas which buttressed the position of continental sugar producers in contentious political debates over trade, imperial, and immigration policy.Footnote ² Indeed, the racialization of sugar labor and import duties has a much longer history, stretching back to the Atlantic slave trade, which supplied forced laborers for sugar plantations beginning in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³ In the post-emancipation period, the link between race and sugar took a new twist as sugar growers sought new supplies of low-wage plantation laborers in Asia. The specter of Asiatic “coolies” animated late-nineteenth century debates about the nature of free labor and plantation agriculture.Footnote ⁴ Junius Aryan's plea thus appealed above all to anti-Asian sentiment among his readers, including Senator Francis G. Newlands (D-Nevada). Like many of his contemporaries, Newlands believed that US territorial integrity was threatened not only by imports and immigrants, but also by US imperial expansion, which threatened to disrupt the racial sovereignty maintained by trade and immigration policies. For Newlands and others at the turn of the century the exclusion of Asian immigrants was one of the key issues at stake in the debates over the United States’ imperial policy. Sometimes they voiced that concern in direct ways, but more often these anxieties emerged in the contrast between civilized, Aryan beet sugar and tropical cane sugar.

As the United States struggled to make sense of its new role as an imperial power after 1896, sugar had a starring role in the ongoing spectacle of empire played out in the pages of small town newspapers, in the sugar barrels and candy counters of local stores, and on the political stage of Washington, D.C. Policymakers in the United States did not begin with an overarching imperial vision that united the colonial policies for each of the insular areas. Neither did they or the general public accept US imperial expansion without debate. From the Spanish-American War forward, many people worried that the racially heterogeneous populations of each of the newly acquired islands might undermine US American democratic ideals, ideals which many understood to be premised on racial homogeneity.Footnote ⁵ One outcome of this ambivalence over empire was that each of the new sugar producing islands received different treatment in US law and practice. Hawaii, acquired through treaty in 1898, was incorporated as a territory. Property, citizenship, and trade laws extended to Hawaii somewhat more seamlessly than to any of the other island possessions. By contrast, Puerto Rico and the Philippines remained unincorporated territories, with the understanding that neither place was likely to be admitted as a US state. It was assumed that the Philippines would eventually be granted independence when its residents had successfully learned to be civilized.Footnote ⁶ Finally, Cuba remained independent, albeit within a United States-imposed legal and military framework that limited its sovereignty in political and economic matters.Footnote ⁷ Despite different histories and different ideas about the value of each island, sugar was an overriding commonality across the new US empire.Footnote ⁸ The challenge of regulating the flows of sugar and the labor required to produce it, more so than any other commodity, forced policymakers to consider Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines in relation to each other and in relation to producers and consumers in the United States.

Between 1898 and the early 1930s there was a broad consensus among policymakers that tariffs, particularly sugar tariffs, were a critical element in the United States' management of its overseas empire. As a later observer pointed out, “our sugar policy, formed after the Spanish War, was of more immediate significance than our political policy.”Footnote ⁹ Proponents and opponents of expansion all believed that sugar tariffs could be used to achieve their policy goals, and in all cases the logic that underwrote this faith in tariffs was at heart racial. For people opposed to U.S. overseas expansion, tariffs that limited the movement of cane sugar from the colonies into the United States promised to limit the growth of a racially inferior class of subservient plantation workers. For those who endorsed overseas expansion, preferential tariffs would stimulate new agricultural industries in the islands, industries modeled along the lines of the civilized, efficient, and industrial ideals brought by paternalistic white modernizers from the United States. Though they disagreed about how to go about it, policymakers across the political spectrum believed that they could use tariffs to shape the economics and demographics of the islands with the eye to whitening and civilizing them. Tariffs were thus a critical forum in which imperial policies were debated in the early twentieth century, and it was in this realm that the racial logics of immigration, empire, and trade increasingly informed each other.

Immigration restriction was closely related to the tariff issue for many people who understood that foreign competition came in two forms: goods produced by “cheap labor” living abroad and goods produced in the United States by “cheap labor” from abroad. Whether the goods or the workers actually crossed the border, the outcome was the same: the erosion of the “American” standard of living, declining wages for working men, and the degradation of white civilization. For this reason, tariff debates frequently invited assessments of the laborers in the United States and abroad, especially as sugar producers in the United States struggled to maintain a low-cost, tractable work force.Footnote ¹⁰ A repeatedly voiced objection to US expansion into insular areas was that goods produced in these places by “cheap tropical labor” would compete with US-made goods inside the US tariff wall. Advocates for the domestic sugar beet industry made this point constantly.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the domestic sugar beet industry also employed immigrant workers, which left them open to criticism from opponents of high tariffs. Sugar trade policy debates occurred at the same time that the decades-long policy of excluding all Chinese workers from the United States was being extended to all Asian workers, especially those from Japan.Footnote ¹²

This article contends that the chronology of popular and legislative movements for restrictive tariffs and immigration exclusion ran parallel courses and that those who spoke for and against such policies did so using the rhetoric of race, labor, and empire. The evidence presented below reveals several iterations of the interaction between trade and immigration policies between 1898 and the 1930 in order to argue that a racial logic was embedded at the heart of the rhetoric and practices of sugar tariff setting. The first section explores how Nevada Senator Francis G. Newlands articulated his anxieties over Asian immigration and the sugar industry in debates over imperial policy after 1898. The second section shows how Newlands rearticulated his anti-Asian politics in sugar tariff debates between 1909 and 1913. The third section takes up the changes in immigration and sugar policy that were made during the First World War. These changes set the stage for renewed debates over immigration and the sugar trade in the context of a chaotic and oversupplied world sugar market in the 1920s. The final section describes how the Tariff Commission grappled with these economic circumstances. They hoped to improve tariff making by conducting comparative cost of production studies. Such studies ultimately reinforced the old associations among race, labor, and trade policy and did little to improve the global sugar crisis.

“Better for the Aryan Stomach”: Beet Sugar, the Tariff, and Racial Rhetoric, 1898–1903

Born in Mississippi in 1848, Francis Newlands came of age before the Civil War, and understood racial difference in the terms of the rigid hierarchies of plantation slavery. His faith in white supremacy and manifest destiny—along with his family investments—carried him West, first to San Francisco, and later to Nevada, where he was elected as a Democratic representative and later senator.Footnote ¹³ Like many southern Democrats, Newlands envisioned the United States as a racially uniform democracy, and he promoted various policies to achieve this vision. As a westerner, Newlands believed that white civilization was destined to spread across North America, so he sponsored legislation to create a system of federal irrigation works that would make Western dry lands suitable for white farmers. Perhaps better known for his work on arid land reclamation as the author of the 1902 National Reclamation Act, Newlands was also a strong proponent of immigration restriction, and he was an outspoken critic of US control over the Philippines. Newlands opposed race mixing and advocated racial and national sovereignty above all else, beliefs that informed his approach to all of these policy issues. He made headlines in 1912 when he proposed a plank for the Democratic platform that advocated a Constitutional amendment to disenfranchise African Americans and bar Asian immigration.Footnote ¹⁴ While Newlands' positions mostly dovetailed with other Democrats, his views on immigration restriction sometimes led him to break with the traditional agrarian Democratic platform on the tariff.

Newlands' position on overseas expansion was closely linked to his race-inflected antimonopoly populism. As Newlands put it, “Whilst we have been engaged in conquering other countries, monopoly has conquered our own.”Footnote ¹⁵ Newlands advocated policies, such as limitations on the size of agricultural holdings, which would hamper the tendencies for overseas capital investment. In his formulation, if the United States applied high tariffs to its possessions investors would have a disincentive to create plantation-style agribusinesses worked by racially inferior laborers. His peers argued that in an effort to obtain raw materials, markets, and recruit labor “White Capitalism” was carrying on an “industrial and troublous invasion” of Asia.Footnote ¹⁶ On the other hand, by excluding undesirable immigrants and promoting small farms, the United States could encourage white farmers to colonize the insular territories, territories that then might eventually become candidates for statehood. Without such policies, Newlands argued, “cheap labor” would be imported for the massive sugar plantations that wealthy Wall Street investors would surely create. Such production would only enrich the “Sugar Trust” at the expense of common US American working people and farmers. Indeed, such thinking led US policymakers to insist on laws limiting the size of landholdings in the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

In 1902 Newlands brought these concerns to the US Congress as they debated a proposed reciprocity treaty with Cuba. American troops were scheduled to withdraw from the island the following summer, in 1903. The proposed treaty would have given Cuba a twenty-five percent reduction on the sugar tariff in exchange for tariff concessions on various US products. Newlands argued that this treaty would be “an extension of the imperialistic legislation inaugurated by the Republican party” in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.Footnote ¹⁷ But his objections differed from those made by his anti-expansionist Democratic colleagues because the single most important issue at stake for Newlands in these debates was Chinese immigration exclusion. Newlands insisted that there could be no free trade with Cuba if that nation did not enact Chinese immigration exclusion. Newlands argued that a reciprocity treaty would give Cuba access to tariff-protected US markets for sugar without any legal means for insisting that producers there adhere to US labor and immigration laws. “The effect,” he said “would be to rapidly stimulate the production of sugar in Cuba by every device known in the way of cheap labor.” The continental beet sugar industry would thus be destroyed by competition from “the cheapest labor of the world”—Chinese “coolies”—in Cuba, whose climate was ideally suited to cane production. Newlands anticipated that in the future the United States would likely annex Cuba for strategic reasons, and it would be best to make plans to control its racial demography in advance. He argued that if the sugar industry were to be included within the United States' tariff wall without controlling labor migration into Cuba, its population would eventually be “much less desirable for annexation than it is now, composed as it will be of Chinese and other imported cheap laborers.”Footnote ¹⁸

Yet Newlands saw no legitimate way to insist that Cuba pass such laws, because, like other Democrats at the time, he opposed imperialistic expansion through which the United States forced its own policies on another supposedly sovereign nation. How could the United States insist that Cuba adopt laws that restricted contract labor and Chinese immigration? To demand that an ostensibly independent nation pass such laws would be an undemocratic and imperialistic infringement on their sovereignty. The only fair way to extend Chinese exclusion to Cuba, explained Newlands, was to invite that country to voluntarily join in a “political union” with the United States as a territory destined for statehood. Newlands had used similar logic when he sponsored the resolution to annex Hawaii in 1898, a resolution which was debated and passed in the midst of the Spanish-American War.Footnote ¹⁹ Then he argued that “wise exclusion laws” would shift the balance towards “white” labor in Hawaii.Footnote ²⁰ He saw Hawaii as critical to military defense, and he feared that Japan might annex the islands if the United States did not.Footnote ²¹ Four years later, in 1902, Newlands optimistically asserted that Chinese exclusion in Hawaii had in fact resulted in higher wages for sugar workers, just as it would in Cuba.Footnote ²² Together immigration and trade policies offered the best possibility for managing the US empire.

During the same session that Congress debated the reciprocity treaty with Cuba, officials set out to negotiate the renewal of Chinese exclusion laws for the United States and their extension to all US territories.Footnote ²³ This kind of synchronicity happened repeatedly—overlapping debates on trade and immigration policy were common. Newlands was shrewd in his attempt to harness the passions that flared during discussions of Chinese immigration. A political union with Cuba was never seriously considered, particularly because the Teller Amendment, passed in 1898, declared that the United States would not annex Cuba. Instead, Congress granted Cuba a 20% reduction in the sugar tariff in a reciprocity treaty which passed later in 1903.Footnote ²⁴ Newlands' efforts did, however, help to ensure that a backdoor means was found to implement Chinese exclusion in the newly independent Cuba. Under the Platt Amendment, Cuba had agreed to abide by all military orders in effect when US troops withdrew. Thus, shortly before US troops withdrew, the US command in Cuba issued a military order prohibiting the admission of Chinese laborers.Footnote ²⁵ Three years later the Cuban legislature formalized the policy, and over the coming years they enacted further restrictive immigration laws in hopes of controlling foreign investment in the sugar industry.Footnote ²⁶

Unlike Cuba, which nominally attained independence, the United States retained both Puerto Rico and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, so the politics of sugar, trade, and migration played out differently in these places. The war and its imperial aftermath created new budget deficits for the US government, and policymakers strategized about how tariffs could be used to support their colonial policies.Footnote ²⁷ Colonial administrators, such as William Howard Taft, the civil governor for the Philippines (1901–1903), advocated import and export duties as a means to raise the revenue to fund insular governments.Footnote ²⁸ But Taft also knew that free trade relations with the United States would invite capital investment, jobs, and new purchasing power among the colonial natives. As Taft put it, “The investment of American capital in the islands is necessary to their proper development, and is necessary to the material, and therefore the spiritual, uplifting of the Filipino people.”Footnote ²⁹ Without the stimulus of trade with the United States, there seemed little hope of modernizing the islands.

Newlands was correct in the sense that proponents of expansion did look to the insular possessions precisely as new sites for capital investment in extractive industries like sugar. Interestingly, colonial administrators used the same rhetoric of race to defend a position quite different from Newlands'. Insular sugar production would be profitable, they argued, not because of the low-wage labor but because of the technological efficiency and inborn ingenuity white capitalists brought to fertile tropical landscapes.Footnote ³⁰ Their perspective was particularly evident in the visual rhetoric they used in their reports. Government officials printed images which used the same idiom as opponents of colonial sugar and workers—opponents like Francis Newlands—used to argue for restriction. Images of the technologies of sugar production, which provided an indexical interpretation of categories of primitive and civilized, were widely circulated by colonial administrators in their reports and through exhibits at world's fairs and expositions.Footnote ³¹ For them, the juxtaposition of “native” sugar technologies with the superior, efficient machinery and management brought by US capital investors and managers justified colonial development of the sugar industry.

While proponents and opponents of overseas expansion debated how to use tariffs to promote their particular visions of civilization, the decision about how much flexibility Congress and colonial administrators would have in creating revenue and trade policies for the island possessions was actually made by the Supreme Court in the 1901 case Downes v. Bidwell.Footnote ³² The ruling in Downes argued that after Congress had created a separate territorial administration for Puerto Rico, “though not foreign, [the territory is] outside of the restrictions applicable to interstate commerce.”Footnote ³³ The outcome was that Congress was authorized to set individual tariff policies for each of the insular areas since they were deemed to be “unincorporated territories,” neither foreign nor domestic from the perspective of the Constitution and the regulation of commerce.Footnote ³⁴ Congress was free to grant substantial tariff concessions—even free trade—in sugar regardless of the overall policy applicable to the United States. As a result, Congress enacted different policies for each of the possessions. In each case concerns over labor and competition with the sugar beet industry were never far from their minds. In 1902 Congress set tariffs for exports from the Philippines to the United States at seventy-five percent lower than those from foreign nations.Footnote ³⁵ Under the Foraker Act of April 12, 1900, Congress set tariffs for Puerto Rico at fifteen percent of the rate for foreign goods for two years, after which there would be no duty.Footnote ³⁶ In both cases the proceeds from these duties were to be set aside to pay for the expenses of governing the territories.

Hawaii posed yet a different set of circumstances, since it had been annexed through a treaty between the Republic of Hawaii and the United States in 1898. The treaty provided that Hawaiian Islands were “annexed as a part of the territory of the United States and are subject to the sovereign dominion thereof.”Footnote ³⁷ Residents of the islands became US citizens, and the treaty anticipated that the customs laws of the United States would be extended to Hawaii through an act of Congress. Congress extended the customs and revenue laws of the United States to Hawaii through the Organic Act of 1900, which designated Hawaii as a customs district of the United States.Footnote ³⁸ As an organized incorporated territory Hawaii was within the realm of the domestic, and any tariffs legislated for the continental United States automatically applied there.

The different policies enacted in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii through treaties, court rulings, and congressional lawmaking created a confusing and incoherent sugar trade policy. Cobbled together outside of the formal realm of congressional tariff making, the sugar trade policy that emerged after the turn of the century meant that the existing, legislated tariff rate was essentially meaningless. Congress would be called to resolve and modify the various insular duties through regular tariff legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Race and empire would continue to shape debates over sugar tariff policy.

Imported Labor and Imported Sugar: Debating Tariffs and Immigration, 1909–1913

Voters and politicians passionately debated the tariff from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Republicans tended to view tariffs as a way to encourage and promote capital investments in new industries within the continental United States. They argued that “infant industries” needed protection in order to grow into self-sufficient national industries. Democrats, on the other hand, saw tariffs as a burden to consumers and a boon to rich industrialists.Footnote ³⁹ Democrats argued that moderate to low tariffs were a legitimate means for raising revenue, so long as the duties didn't increase prices to consumers or create artificial stimulus for industries that couldn't survive without the tariff “hot house.” Since the federal government operated with a budget surplus for much of the late nineteenth century, many Democrats viewed tariffs as an unnecessary boon to Northern industrialists and the Civil War veterans whose pensions were funded by these surpluses. But the sugar tariff had a discombobulating effect on these party lines. Normally protectionist Republicans lauded free trade for sugar, and low-tariff Democrats were some of the most vocal proponents of high sugar tariffs. Race and empire were as important in policymakers' calculations on the sugar tariff as were party politics.

Four groups vied for their share of the sugar bowl after 1898. First, beet and cane sugar producers from the continental United States—Colorado, California, Michigan, Louisiana—joined together to mount a formidable lobby for high tariffs. A second, equally well-funded lobby argued for lower tariffs. Sugar refiners—commonly called the Sugar Trust—based primarily in New York and the eastern seaboard—bought huge quantities of raw sugar on the world market and thus benefited from low sugar tariffs. After the First World War these refiners also invested in sugar production throughout the Caribbean, and they hoped that low tariffs would maintain the profitability of these investments. Sugar refiners had the assistance of prominent Republicans in their bid for low sugar tariffs. Cubans were the third group who hired lobbyists to influence the sugar tariff, and they lobbied for lower tariffs, typically through hired US American lobbyists and in collaboration with the eastern seaboard sugar refiners who bought most of their sugar. Because Cuba received a preferential rate under the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903, they dominated the market. By the second decade of the twentieth century, less than one percent of US sugar was purchased from countries that paid a full duty on their imports.Footnote ⁴⁰ Cuba supplied more than fifty percent of the sugar consumed in the United States, displacing European beet sugar and Java cane sugar. Producers of cane sugar in the insular U.S. possessions—Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—were the fourth group lobbying for sugar tariffs. They benefited from high tariffs since they each paid less than the full duty and thus had privileged access to a protected market. Insular interests normally allied with continental beet and cane producers against Cubans and refiners. These were tenuous alliances, though, since continental producers lobbied hard to prevent or end trade preferences for insular sugars. For this reason Congressmen from beet-growing areas were at the forefront of deliberations over how to draft a colonial policy for the United States.

Different sugar interests hired professional lobbyists to curry the favor of key senators and representatives across party lines, and they spent vast sums of money in subtle and not-so-subtle propaganda. Lobbyists' work created a racialized geography of sugar production because they made their pitches by explicitly comparing the labor and production conditions in each place. The rhetoric around race and labor was elaborated and recirculated through Congressional subcommittee hearings in Washington, DC, at which interested parties could testify after traveling to the capital at their own expense. Such hearings produced voluminous testimony and equally large amounts of promotional literature, much of which repeated the same arguments about the racially inferior laborers employed in various sugar producing regions. Issues of race and labor coalesced around the sugar trade in large part because continental sugar producers and their lobbyists so consistently argued to exclude the territories from within the US “tariff wall” while refiners and Cuban producers publicized poor working conditions in the beet fields and insular areas.

Each of the four groups advocating for favorable sugar tariffs agreed on the commonplace assumption that migration and markets were interconnected issues that could not be debated in isolation. After the turn of the century, whites in Western states broadened their interest to exclusion of workers not only from China, but also from Japan. In the 1880s and 1890s recruiters for Hawaiian sugar plantations began hiring Japanese workers. After the turn of the century many of these workers moved from Hawaii to California seeking higher wages and opportunities for independent employment. As Japanese migrants participated in labor actions organized along ethnic lines and as they worked to build successful small farms across California, white people in California perceived that Japanese workers posed a threat to their racial order.Footnote ⁴¹ Western Republicans and Democrats, including Francis Newlands, called for formal exclusion of Japanese workers. This demand was opposed at the national level, however, by those who argued that immigration restrictions damaged US credibility in relations with China and Japan, each of which were potentially lucrative markets for US goods. Indeed, each of these nations enacted boycotts in retaliation for immigration restrictions.Footnote ⁴² As a compromise, President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a diplomatic agreement with Japan in 1907—known as the Gentleman's Agreement—whereby Japan would voluntarily restrict the migration of their laborers, and in exchange the United States would not formalize immigration restrictions against Japanese.Footnote ⁴³

Many people, including Newlands, were not swayed by the logic of expanded markets or diplomatic niceties. As one writer put it, “The ‘open door’ is a door shut to American labor.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In California, Nevada, and elsewhere anti-Japanese sentiment was articulated through alien land laws and segregation of Japanese school pupils.Footnote ⁴⁵ In early 1909 Nevada passed a law restricting the rights of Japanese to own land. Newlands was quick to defend the anti-Japanese measure against President Roosevelt's criticism.Footnote ⁴⁶ “The United States,” Newlands wrote in a widely circulated letter to Nevada Governor Denver Dickerson, “as a matter of self protection and self preservation, must declare by statutory enactment that it will not tolerate race complications.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The Gentleman's Agreement, he asserted, was a bad policy since it compromised US. sovereignty by making domestic legislation through diplomatic channels. He argued, as he had about Cuba in 1902, that sovereign nations must control their own immigration policies in order to maintain racial sovereignty and protect “the white race in their struggle for race integrity and supremacy.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, Newlands was consistent in his belief that territorial sovereignty, asserted through controls over immigration and trade at the border, was essential to maintaining white supremacy in the United States.

As Western legislators worked to enact anti-Japanese legislation, the US Congress began deliberations over the tariff schedules. The tariff debate of 1908–1909 was the first attempt to reconcile the bewildering array of concessions that Congress had granted to Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, and policymakers struggled to remake a coherent policy from the new landscape of insular cane and continental beet sugar production. The framers of the 1909 tariff faced another difficult proposition: The government needed to increase revenue as the nation was recovering from a recession. Some politicians argued that a higher head tax on immigrants could serve as a revenue-producing “tariff” levied on “imported labor.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As one commentator put it, drawing an explicit analogy between goods and bodies, a higher head tax would “make the cost of producing laborers in other countries and importing them into the United States more nearly equal to what it now costs to rear children for the labor market in the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁰

During these tariff debates, colonial administrators from the Philippines lobbied to gain a duty-free allotment of sugar for the Islands.Footnote ⁵¹ Because the Treaty of Paris granted Spain tariff preferences for ten years, this was the first opportunity that the US Congress had to offer the Philippines free trade. Newlands opposed any reduction of the sugar tariff for shipments from the Philippines.Footnote ⁵² Newlands invited Southern politicians to understand the connection between their own “race problem” and anti-Asian sentiment by explicitly linking “coolie labor” with white supremacy in the South. Indeed, Louisiana Democratic Senator and sugar planter Murphy J. Foster joined Newlands by arguing in Congress that “by the importation of free sugar from our colonial dependencies a conflict has been precipitated between the Anglo-Saxon of this country on the one hand and the cooly labor of the Orient and the cheap labor of the Tropics on the other.”Footnote ⁵³ Foster and Newlands shared a faith in the sugar tariff and white supremacy as bases of democracy, and on this basis they convinced Congress to maintain a duty on sugar in the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. Despite this opposition, the Philippines was granted a duty-free allotment of 300,000 tons of sugar per year. This concession was softened by language that positioned the Philippines outside of the United States for tariff purposes and by the provision that colonial administrators could levy export duties in the Philippines.Footnote ⁵⁴

The next tariff revision happened four years later, in 1913, after Democrats had gained control of the presidency and Congress, many of them elected on a low-tariff platform. President Woodrow Wilson followed contemporary economic theorists who argued that US industries would achieve greater efficiency with the increased competition in a low-tariff system.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wilson argued that tariffs were a bad way to generate government revenue because they were inherently biased against consumers. The sugar tariff was an especially insidious “consumption tax” since it was levied on what ought to be a cheap, nutritious food for working families.Footnote ⁵⁶ Wilsonian Democrats argued that the government should instead raise revenue through progressive internal taxation, which would counter the power of monopolies and trusts. While Republicans fought hard against the move to lower or remove trade duties, Newlands was among the few Democrats who argued to retain the tariff on sugar. He made headlines in the spring of 1913 when he broke ranks with Wilson to defend the protective duty on sugar.Footnote ⁵⁷ Newlands' logic was explicitly racial and regional and was echoed in letters sent to him by his constituents. For example, a government official from Hawaii argued that free sugar would force the white people who had moved to Hawaii to leave, to be taken over by “oriental laborers.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Another writer penned a poem: “When Hawaii her old independence regains, The Great ‘Yellow Peril’ will hold the reins … More costly than earthquake, more costly than flood, We shall pay for free sugar—[with] our countryman's blood!”Footnote ⁵⁹ Tariffs were needed to maintain even the colonial possessions' racial integrity.

Newlands also feared for the effect of free sugar on Nevada's single struggling sugar beet factory.Footnote ⁶⁰ Located within a newly completed Truckee Carson irrigation project, a US Reclamation Service project sponsored by Newlands, local farmers and businessmen had founded the factory several years earlier by combining their investments with capital from a beet sugar company in Michigan.Footnote ⁶¹ The Fallon sugar plant was emblematic of the kind of progress Newlands envisioned for the Nevada desert, “the hope of the arid and semi-arid west,” as he phrased it.Footnote ⁶² The sugar plant signaled Newlands' hopes that white settlers could coax productive, modern small farms out of the desert landscape, displacing Native American land rights in the process.Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, displaced Paiute and Shoshone Indians performed much of the wage labor in the Fallon irrigation district, allowing beet growers to avoid the vilified Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino laborers who worked the crop elsewhere.Footnote ⁶⁴

Despite his protests, Newlands eventually voted for the Underwood-Simmons bill in 1913 out of loyalty to the Democratic Party and President Wilson. The bill contained provisions that would have gradually eliminated the sugar tariff over a period of three years. What's more, the bill also lifted the cap on imports from the Philippines that had been imposed in 1909, and it prohibited export duties within the Philippines.Footnote ⁶⁵ Between 1913 and 1916 the duty was indeed lowered. But the war in Europe changed both the landscape of sugar production and the realities for the Wilson administration as they prepared the nation to enter the war. Though the war provided sugar producers in the United States with assurance of tariff protection and expanded demand for their product, the conflict and its aftermath created new problems with which policymakers would be forced to grapple.

A Military Burial: Wartime Sugar Policies, 1917–1919

The First World War shifted the global geography of sugar production and created new opportunities for policymakers to protect US racial sovereignty through immigration and sugar trade policies.Footnote ⁶⁶ Before the war, European beet sugar had supplied slightly less than half of the world sugar supply, but by the end of the war that figure was reduced by more than half.Footnote ⁶⁷ With a reduced capacity to produce their own sugar, Europeans bought larger amounts of cane sugar from abroad. Policymakers in the United States faced a global shortage of sugar, a food that many planners deemed to be a vital source of cheap calories for civilians and the military. Limited overseas shipping and labor strikes in Cuba bolstered policymakers' belief that the United States ought to advance its sugar self-sufficiency by maintaining—if not increasing—sugar beet production on the mainland.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, wartime demand stimulated new investments in plantations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines and encouraged new patterns of labor migration.

Even before the United States entered the European war, policymakers foresaw the strategic importance that sugar would play in funding the war effort. In early 1916 President Wilson and Congress made plans to meet the economic contingencies brought by the war, even as they debated whether the United States would participate.Footnote ⁶⁹ As the date for enacting free sugar provisions of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff approached in 1916, policymakers eager to fund Wilson's war preparedness measures took a new approach toward the sugar tariff, arguing that “sugar [is] one of the best of all revenue-producing articles.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The sugar duty generated approximately $40 million in government revenue. Together with prodding from Newlands and other advocates of a protective duty on sugar, Congress repealed the controversial free sugar provisions.Footnote ⁷¹ As one commentator later wrote, “the war killed once and for all the old debate on whether sugar should be protected, and free trade in sugar, as planned for by President Wilson, was given a military burial.”Footnote ⁷² Indeed, complete elimination of the sugar tariff was never again seriously considered.

In support of the goal of self-sufficiency, Congress not only repealed the free sugar provisions of the Underwood-Simmons Tariff, they also made a pledge to grant the Philippines independence.Footnote ⁷³ Southern and Western Democrats argued that by protecting Philippine producers, the sugar tariff stimulated production there at the expense of US beet producers.Footnote ⁷⁴ To make matters worse, some of those sugar producers, it seemed, were Japanese, which played to popular fears about Japanese imperial ambitions.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Jones Bill, enacted in 1916, promised to grant the Philippines independence as soon as a stable government was established there, at which time tariff concessions with the United States would be eliminated. The promise of independence for the Philippines thus softened the blow for those who opposed the sugar tariff. While high wartime prices and tariff concessions promised to stimulate the sugar industry in the short term, the ultimate promise of independence discouraged—by design—the investment of large amounts of capital in Filipino sugar production.Footnote ⁷⁶

Tightened restrictions on immigration and wartime urban industrial jobs exacerbated growers' difficulties in hiring seasonal laborers to tend mainland beets and Hawaiian cane. The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Wilson's veto, doubled the head tax on immigrants, imposed literacy requirements, and strengthened immigration officials' powers of exclusion and deportation. The Act, which limited immigration into all US territories, went farther than any previous immigration legislation in excluding migrants from Asia. It created an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” a geographically defined region from which laborers could not legally enter the United States.Footnote ⁷⁷ The law heightened restrictions but did not prohibit Mexicans from crossing the border in search of agricultural work in the United States. This practice of hiring Mexican agricultural laborers was condoned by the US Labor Department, which, at the demand of sugar beet and cotton growers and railroads in the United States, collaborated with the Mexican government to allow a temporary exemption from the literacy test and head tax.Footnote ⁷⁸ Hawaiian sugar planters reacted to these immigration restrictions by intensifying their recruitment of laborers from the Philippines, whom they had occasionally sought since the turn of the century.Footnote ⁷⁹ Filipinos were not included in the “Barred Zone” because the Philippines was a US territory and Filipinos were classified as US “nationals.” Uneven capital development in the Philippines—the result of the interplay of local factors and US governance—meant that rather than staying in the Philippines, more Filipino laborers migrated to Hawaii and eventually to the mainland to work sugar and other crops there. In the coming decade, proponents of race-based immigration exclusion would cite the supposed racial inferiority of Filipino workers in the United States as yet another reason to grant independence to the Philippines, since independence would allow the legal exclusion of both Filipino workers and sugar.

Comparative Costs of Production and the Crisis of the 1920s

Policymakers in the post-war period continued to have faith in the usefulness of sugar tariffs as a way to control the racial risks of empire. Newlands died in 1917, and by the time the next tariff was enacted in 1921, a subtle shift occurred in the alignment between the politics of immigration and trade. Where high-tariff Democrats like Newlands had made easy reference to the dual effects of immigration and unprotected trade on US American living standards, his successors increasingly found themselves defending high sugar duties while arguing for looser immigration laws since sugar beet growers depended on Mexican (and Filipino) workers to produce their crop. On the other hand, policymakers who supported low sugar tariffs began defending the strong race-based national origins immigration restrictions enacted in the mid-1920s.

Tariff Commissioner William S. Culbertson exemplified these new alignments beginning in the early 1920s. A Pennsylvania Republican appointed to the Commission by President Wilson, Culbertson supported moderate tariffs. As a tariff commissioner in the early 1920s, he recommended lowering the sugar duty. But Culbertson also attracted public attention for his support of race-based immigration restriction as Congress debated the National Origins Act in 1923 and 1924. “The white race” he said, “is exhausting its vitality and risking onslaught by Asiatics.”Footnote ⁸⁰ He made the case, as Newlands had more than a decade earlier, that humanity was composed of distinct and incompatible races. For that reason, immigration legislation was a critical realm in which nations ought to assert national sovereignty. However, Culbertson's analysis of the immigration problem focused on global political economy because his experience during the World War convinced him that struggles among imperial nations over access to raw materials and foodstuffs were at the root of armed international conflict.Footnote ⁸¹ He argued that immigration restriction would ultimately be inadequate in the face of the “rising specter of overpopulation and underproduction” in Asia.Footnote ⁸² Without a system of international trade to stimulate material prosperity abroad, Culbertson believed that the United States would continue to face immigration pressure and international disdain for its restrictive policies. In this view, in sharp contrast to Newlands' earlier views, Culbertson held that lower tariff walls and the elimination of colonial tariff preferences would slow immigration to civilized, temperate climates. However, Culbertson found himself at odds with many of his Republican colleagues, most of whom continued to support high tariffs and strong immigration restrictions through the 1920s. But his position foreshadowed one that would become commonplace by the 1930s.

Such debates took place amidst an overproduction crisis in the world of sugar. The changes during and after the First World War created conditions for a vastly expanded supply of sugar, a situation that amounted to a crisis in the global sugar economy by the end of the 1920s. During the war, US capital poured into Cuba, stimulating production and the modernization of milling facilities there. By 1920 nearly fifty percent of the sugar produced in Cuba was made in American-owned mills, a factor that would increasingly enter into the tariff debates.Footnote ⁸³ High prices in 1919 and 1920 led many Cuban planters and refiners to invest heavily during the so-called “dance of the millions,” accruing debt that far outpaced their ability to repay their loans once prices returned to normal.Footnote ⁸⁴ Sugar producers in Cuba thus controlled a vastly expanded productive infrastructure in the 1920s, one that they hoped would eventually pay. Likewise, Filipino elites and US colonial administrators attempted to modernize the sugar industry in the Philippines during and after the war by offering special financing and courting US capital investors. Because they had made loans to Filipinos to modernize the sugar industry, the US administration in the Philippines had a vested interested in increasing production and maintaining tariff protection through the 1920s. What was more, by 1923 European beet sugar producers were well on their way to achieving their prewar production levels. As more sugar entered the world market, prices declined. Sugar producers in Cuba, the Philippines, and the United States responded to declining prices by increasing production, which raised their marginal returns but exacerbated the price crisis in the oversupplied world market. As sugar prices spiraled downwards, continental and insular sugar producers demanded higher tariffs. Republican victories in the 1920 presidential and congressional elections insured that calls for tariff protection would be heard in Washington.

Through the 1920s Congress heeded the calls for higher sugar tariffs, raising the tariff three times between 1921 and 1930. According to the new procedures outlined in the 1922 Tariff Law, the president had discretion to change the tariff after the Tariff Commission conducted a comparative cost of production study and made a recommendation. Reform-minded Republicans had long espoused comparative cost of production studies, conducted using the methods of cost accounting, as a scientific and efficient way for policymakers to set reasonable trade duties. Democrats had been slow to accept comparative cost of production studies, but the Tariff Commission, formed in 1917, gained legitimacy as it collaborated with wartime agencies to set prices and manage distribution of commodities. By the time a new Republican administration took office in 1921, the Tariff Commission and cost of production studies were positioned to be the keystones of tariff policy. Between 1919 and 1934 the Tariff Commission conducted studies of production cost in the sugar industry in the United States, Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.Footnote ⁸⁵ But they were beset by internal conflicts over the practice and theory of cost of production beginning with their study of the sugar industry in 1923 and 1924. Culbertson and the majority of other Tariff Commission members agreed that the sugar tariff ought to be lowered, a position that put them at odds with the traditional defenders of high sugar tariffs in Congress and the White House. Partly because the Commission was unable to reach a consensus, President Coolidge did not implement their sugar tariff recommendations in 1924. Instead, the issue remained open for the work of well-funded lobbyists in Washington until Congress revisited—and raised—the sugar tariff in Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.

The language of comparative production costs was racialized in public deliberations in the press and on the floor of Congress. The practice of first-hand observation, as institutionalized through comparative cost studies, legitimated the racialized rhetoric used by lobbyists. For example, lobbyists for the Cuban industry publicized the labor of Mexican children in American sugar beet fields. Lobbyists for the beet industry rebutted with unfavorable descriptions of Haitian and Jamaican migrant laborers working in Cuban cane fields.Footnote ⁸⁶ Longtime sugar-beet industry lobbyist Truman G. Palmer, for example, wrote to President Coolidge to complain that the “Sugar Trust” had invested heavily in Cuban sugar plantations, which they “exploit with labor brought in from Jamaica, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Barbados and the Canary Islands.”Footnote ⁸⁷ As one critic in The Nation wrote in 1929, “Cuba's white gold, the source of its ‘national prosperity,’ depends” on black labor. “The blacker Cuba becomes,” he continued, “the more white sugar will it be able to pour out in competition with the rest of the world.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Rather than protecting white labor, tariff preferences seemed to encourage planters to employ racially inferior workers.

After the Smoot-Hawley tariff was enacted in 1930, sugar production increased in the Philippines and in all other regions that supplied the United States industry except for Cuba, whose share of the market plummeted. Indeed, by 1934 policymakers agreed that the tariff had failed to create a hierarchically integrated geography of sugar production for the US market. The dramatic increases in sugar production in the Philippines and Puerto Rico after 1930 made it clear to many observers in the United States that a new approach to immigration restriction and trade regulation would be necessary if the United States was to successfully renegotiate the intertwined politics of exclusion and empire. During the New Deal of the 1930s, policymakers created a new system of production quotas, through which sales of sugar in the US market would be allocated to domestic, colonial, and foreign sugar producers. Exclusion of the Philippines was critical to the new sugar programs. As the economic crisis deepened, the movements to grant the Philippines independence had gained momentum both among nationalists in the Philippines and exclusionists in the United States.Footnote ⁸⁹ The 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act established a timeline for independence that included, among other measures, gradual elimination of tariff preferences and imposition of export duties, immigration restrictions, and sugar quotas. The bill can be understood as an attempt to reconcile to the politics of immigration and trade for the Philippines and as one element of a broader program of New Deal readjustment in the sugar economy.Footnote ⁹⁰ As one New Deal administrator later put it, the legislation passed in 1934 “represented the first real change in our colonial policy in 35 years.”Footnote ⁹¹ Through the New Deal sugar quotas, policymakers renegotiated a domestic geography that tentatively included Hawaiian and Puerto Rican sugar producers, excluded the Philippine Islands, and offered renewed concessions to Cuba.