But during their discussion, Palin opened up a new front in her attack of President Obama, apparently suggesting America’s first black president wants to return to the days “before the Civil War”:

Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that that gravity, that mistake, took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.

Watch it:

The “different classes” system Palin seems to be referring to is perhaps better known as slavery.

The entire conversation is based on the mischaracterization of Derrick Bell, a pioneer in legal scholarly work. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, and the video that Hannity insists is a scandal shows Barack Obama, then a student, speaking at a rally in support of Professor Bell. Students and faculty were protesting to urge Harvard to hire more minority faculty.

Of course, Palin has struggled with history before.

“Our Founding Fathers never meant for Washington, D.C. to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact they were very much afraid if that because they’d just had this experience with this far-away government that had centralized thought process and planning and what have you, and then it was actually the reason that we fought the revolution in the 16th century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown if you will,” Perry said.

Of course, the Revolution took place in the 18th century. “Debates are not my strong suit,” Perry told Politico last night. Apparently history is not either.

Bashir asked Brinkley whether Obama’s failure to mention climate change was an opportunity that’s been missed. Brinkley’s answer was quite solid for someone whose specialty is not climate:

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I’ve often said that future generations, which of course include future historians, will judge Obama (and Bush and all current political leaders) harshly for inaction on climate change.  How could they not when they will be suffering through multiple catastrophes post-2040 that could have been prevented or seriously reduced — widespread Dust-Bowlification; multi-feet sea level rise followed by SLR of 6 to 12+ inches a decade until the planet is ice free; massive species loss; the ocean turning into large, hot acidified dead zones; and ever-strengthening superstorms that bring devastation to country after country that equals or surpasses what has happened to Texas, large parts of the East Coast, Moscow and Pakistan and Nashville and New Orleans (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).

After calling on Obama to deliver “a presidential prime time address on global warming,” Brinkley, who has authored and edited books on Ronald Reagan, compares Obama’s inaction on climate to Reagan’s on AIDS.  He says “you see President Obama at this juncture needing to lead on  the global warming issue.”

Brinkley goes on to say:

You know I’m here in Austin right now and it’s  109 degrees.   All over the country, in the Great Plains, there’s drought, there’s wildfires that have been going on  in New Mexico, there’s a lot of  unprecedented weather patterns going on here.  We all know the word global warming, but only the president has a security documents.

So I would urge President Obama … sometime within the, say, next half a year, come to the American people and say  I came into office giving a lot of speeches about global warming, here’s what we know about it and here’s  some of the things we might have to do with the future to make America safe.

If you listen to the entire interview, then you heard Bashir say that when he interviewed Bill Nye the science guy, Nye was supposedly “absolutely clear that hurricanes like this were the result of climate change.”

As you can guess, Nye didn’t quite say that.  Here’s that interview:

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Related Post:

• How Does Global Warming Make Hurricanes Like Irene More Destructive?

I half agree with the sentiments in Ezra Klein’s Bloomberg column about the importance of the 2012 election, but I think there’s a dangerously misleading idea lurking there. He quotes Larry Bartels’ brilliant exposition of the point (see this PDF but also this one) that you have to put FDR and the New Deal realignment in comparative perspective. All governments that were in office when the Depression hit lost power, and all governments that were in office during recovery regained it. The implication in the column seems to be a kind of nihilistic one, where economic outcomes are just driven by luck and a bad recession just so happens to take a long time to recovery from. This is partly true, perhaps, in the case of small open economies but large economies are primarily custodians of their own short-term destinies. A long recession is a recession to which policymakers mounted an ineffective response. Herbert Hoover did have bad luck relative to (say) Warren Harding but he also had bad policy relative to Franklin Roosevelt.

Now to be clear, what’s at issue here is “bad policy” in a very narrow sense of policy that was made for growth of output and income. In broader terms, the policies of Adolf Hitler were far inferior to those of his predecessors in Germany. But the Nazi regime, under the leadership of Hjalmar Schacht, implemented highly effective monetary policies just as the Roosevelt administration used Executive Order 6102 and other monetary measures to produce recovery. Similarly, the recession of 1937 wasn’t just bad luck for Roosevelt, it was bad policy. Very ideologically distinct governments in Sweden and Japan abandoned policy orthodoxy very quickly during the Depression era and growth returned quite swiftly. France, by contrast, never really abandoned orthodoxy and never really recovered. It’s true that Canada was heavily buffeted by trade policy shifts in the United States and United Kingdom rather than driven by purely internal factors, but that’s an idiosyncratic fact about Canada’s place in the world.

Which is all to say that my view is that it’s true that the next president will have the opportunity to pass a bunch of controversial legislation, much of it unrelated to the recession, and then have both his person and his policies be rendered popular by a robust economic recovery. But the existence of some policies that promote robust recovery from the recession is a necessary ingredient to that mix. The policies we got in 2008 and 2009 were pretty good — they prevented calamity — but they didn’t promote robust recovery and that, rather than bad timing, is why Obama hasn’t benefited from an FDR effect. And whoever’s president in 2013 will have an opportunity — but just an opportunity — to do better on that score. You still need policies that work. It’s entirely possible that we’ll simply shift into a new equilibrium with a permanently elevated pool of long-term unemployed, permanently reduced labor force participation, slow growth, and stagnating living standards.

A poltroon is a coward.

He argues that the “republican” ideology that prevailed in the late 18th century held that public officials should be disinterested participants. But they needed some form of income. Ideally, that income would take the form of land rents. But under American circumstances, interest payments might have to substitute:

But with the exception of rents from property, most such direct sources of income were defiled by interest. That is, the income of most American gentlemen did not come without work and participation in commerce, as Adam Smith suggested it ought to for leaders to be truly disinterested. The “revenue” of the English landed aristocrats was unique, said Smith; their income from rents “costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.” Thus would-be disinterested American public leaders struggled to find an equivalent, a reliable source of income that was not stained by marketplace exertion and interest. Many gentlemen of leisure found such a source in the interest from money they had lent out. It is not surprising that so many of the gentry used their wealth in this way. After all, what were the alternatives for investment in an underdeveloped society that lacked banks, corporations, and stock markets? Land, of course, was a traditional object of investment, but in America, as John Witherspoon pointed out in an important speech in the Continental Congress, rent-producing land could never allow for as stable a source of income as it did in England. In the New World, said Witherspoon, where land was more plentiful and cheaper than it was in the Old World, gentlemen seeking a steady income “would prefer money at interest to purchasing and holding real estate.”

Of course “disinterested” people of this sort weren’t actually disinterested. Instead, they had strong economic interests in perpetuating slavery and avoiding inflation.

And, indeed, James Madison was very upset about inflation:

In his working paper drafted in the late winter of 1787 entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” Madison spent very little time on the impotence of the Confederation. What was really on his mind was the deficiencies of the state governments: he devoted more than half his paper to the “multiplicity,” “mutability,” and “injustice” of the laws passed by the states. Particularly alarming and unjust in his eyes were the paper money acts, stay laws, and other forms of debtor-relief legislation that hurt creditors and violated individual property rights. And he knew personally what he was talking about. Although we usually think of Madison as a bookish scholar who got all his thoughts from his wide reading, he did not develop his ideas about the democratic excesses of the state governments by poring through the bundles of books that Jefferson was sending him from Europe. He learned about popular politics and legislative abuses firsthand—by being a member of the Virginia Assembly.

Last (but first in the book), Wood draws a contrast between noting that ideas and interests were bound together, and making the vulgar argument that the constitution was nothing but a plot to advance the interests of creditors:

Such realists or materialists—that is, the Progressive historians—may be right that ideas do not “cause” behavior, but it does not follow that ideas are unimportant and have little or no effect on behavior, or that they can be treated as just one “factor” that now and then comes into play in human experience. Otherwise we would not spend so much time and energy arguing about ideas. I think it is possible to concede the realist or materialist position—that passions and interests lie behind all our behavior—without deprecating the role of ideas. Even if ideas are not the underlying motives for our actions, they are constant accompaniments of our actions. There is no behavior without ideas, without language. Ideas and language give meaning to our actions, and there is almost nothing that we humans do to which we do not attribute meaning. These meanings constitute our ideas, our beliefs, our ideology, and collectively our culture. As we have learned from both “the linguistic turn” and “the cultural turn” over the past several decades, our minds are essential to the ordering of our experience.

In other words, the leaders of the early republic had an ideological account of what sort of person was suited for public office. That naturally led to an ideological account of what sort of interests were legitimate. If a creditor isn’t just a member of an interest group, but actually someone earning a living in a uniquely virtuous way, then those advancing an inflationary agenda are a uniquely pernicious brand of conspirators.

With Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 I’ve now read six of the ten published volumes of the Oxford History of the United States and I have to say that it’s just a really excellent series. These kind of broad surveys are most helpful when dealing with a period you don’t know anything about, and Middlekauff is covering the relatively familiar terrain of Revolution and Founding so it doesn’t stand out quite as much as, say, the Wood or Howe books on the early 19th century. But it’s still quite good. In particular, though America is kind of soaked in information about the personalities of the era the predominant form is the biography, which winds up obscuring all context. The wider view gives you a better sense of what’s actually going on.

The main theme is the ways in which America changed over the course of a struggle that, though certainly not a “social revolution” was nonetheless a prolonged political and military undertaking that entailed mass participation and naturally involved substantial changes. The war was fought in part because people had a sense of their own identities as Americans and the rights that entailed, but the process of fighting for those rights, and then for independence, and then to create a workable system of government also brought that consciousness into being. Middlekauff remarks that the American Revolution is remarkable for seeming so inevitable in retrospect while simultaneously having been so unforeseen at the time.

The disappointment of the book is in terms of what it doesn’t cover. As a volume in a History of the United States it’s very focused on what the Revolution meant for America and Americans. That means that in terms of the war qua war you get scanty treatment of the global strategic situation and the thinking in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Madrid. The war was substantially unleashed in parliament, where there was no willingness to renounce taxing power over North America, and it was won there as well when English elites decided that pouring more resources into trying to establish that principle didn’t make sense. That said, a book can’t be everything and this is a good one.

The adorable animated Massachusetts colonists of “Elbow Room” are pretty fantastic, too, as are the short jokes about Napoleon:

Obviously, Schoolhouse Rock is not a bastion of nuance or anything, but in terms of catchy ways to get kids to memorize basic facts in history and other disciplines, it’s pretty impressive. I still kind of hear the Preamble to the tune of the series’ song about it.

William Wallis profiles Rwandan President Paul Kagame under the headline “Lunch with Paul Kagame: Is the Rwandan leader a visionary statesman, or a blood-stained tyrant?”

Not wanting to comment on the specifics of a region of the world with which I’m not that familiar, I’m left to wonder why this is meant to be an either/or issue. Andrew Jackson is responsible for ethnic cleansing that could make any blood-stained tyrant proud, but he’s also the main founder of America’s oldest political party, featured on the $20 bill, etc. Napoleon Bonaparte didn’t engage in that kind of massacre and displacement, but surely plenty of people died in the wars he launched. Yet he’s also an important statesman whose various conquests and administrative reforms shaped the subsequent 200 years of European governance in a profound way. If Deng Xiaoping wasn’t a visionary leader then I don’t know who was, but that doesn’t mean nobody ever got run over by a tank protesting the regime he led.

It’s difficult to understand world events by trying to reductively view everything as a struggle of visionary good guys against blood-stained tyrants. Returning to the subject at hand, I think the piece actually makes it perfectly clear that you won’t be able to understand Kagame’s role through this lens, so it’s annoying to see it headlined in this way. Precisely the danger posed by a figure like Kagame is that western leaders will look at his very real and very important accomplishments, conclude that he’s “one of the good guys,” and then turn a blind eye to real flaws in his conduct. Politicians are normally a mixed bag, and need to be assessed as such.

The United States sure is a strange country:

[John] Adams runs the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Florida. What he wants to express on his license plate is his affinity with the Confederacy. A few years ago he designed a plate that reads “Confederate Heritage,” with a rebel flag in the center.

It’s a similar design currently on license plates in nine other states, including Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

You read these stories now and again where Israelis take issue with some street or town square in Palestine or whatnot being named after a “martyr” who killed Israeli civilians. It’s conventional to fight back with citations to some Israeli monument or other to an Irgun guy. But at least Israelis and Palestinians are genuinely in a state of conflict. The Civil War is over and American public culture generally avows the principle that abiding by election results is good, armed rebellion against the US government is bad, and chattel slavery is very bad. Nonetheless monuments to the idea of launching an armed rebellion against the US government when a political party hostile to chattel slavery wins an election are incredibly widespread.

The truth is I am an unlucky honest man that speaks my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate congres—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you and Meade. Adieu. A Hamilton.

Personally, I like his later stuff better.

Some would say the right has a cartoonish view of American history.

On Friday, ThinkProgress caught up with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) at the South Carolina Silver Elephant Dinner, where he had just finished his keynote address. Santorum said he was “not surprised” by the California bill, which he said is a “logical consequence” of court decisions “creating rights.” Presumably, Santorum is referring to the multiple court decisions affirming the right of gay marriage in California. In any case, Santorum said he “certainly would not approve” of teaching gay history:

FANG: I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but California is adopting in their state curriculum for public education a required teaching of the gay rights movement. Are you troubled by that at all? I know you’ve written and talked about this issue of education.

SANTORUM: Well what I talked about is that there are consequences of the court’s actions and I think the court, by ruling the way they did, has created a precedent that states now have to follow, and some states are going farther others. I certainly would not approve of that, but there’s a logical consequence to the courts injecting themselves in creating rights and people attaching their legislative ideas to those rights that in some respects could logically flow from that. So I’m not surprised.

Watch it:

Brandishing his anti-gay social conservative values, Santorum would like schools to censor the contributions of gay American scholars, inventors, and activists. Perhaps he would like to bury the fact that even his own campaign slogan, “Fighting to make America America again,” is borrowed from the gay Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eric Foner offers a critical review of a new book taking the line that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t really interested in fighting slavery. Foner says:

Ultimately, Gallagher’s sharp dichotomy between the goals of Union and emancipation seems excessively schematic. It begs the question of what kind of Union the war was being fought to preserve. The evolution of Lincoln’s own outlook illustrates the problem. On the one hand, as Gallagher notes, Lincoln always insisted that he devised his policies regarding slavery in order to win the war and preserve national unity. Yet years before the Civil War, Lincoln had argued that slavery fatally undermined the nation’s ability to exemplify the superiority of free institutions. The Union to be saved, he said, must be “worthy of the saving.” During the secession crisis, Lincoln could have preserved the Union by yielding to Southern demands. He adamantly refused to compromise on the crucial political issue — whether slavery should be allowed to expand into Western territories.

I’m always interested in this debate because I think it reveals something about the general question of how to evaluate politicians. When you look at the career of Abraham Lincoln, you see a guy who joined the more slavery-skeptical of the two political parties. As a member of the Illinois state legislature, he opposed the short-lived effort to bring slavery to the state. As a member of congress he criticized the Mexican War as a slave power land-grab and backed the anti-slavery Wilmot Proviso. He got back into politics to criticize the Kansas-Nebraska Act as too favorable to slavery. He helped found a new anti-slavery political party. He ran for Senate in 1858 as a member of the new anti-slavery party and criticized his opponent as an appeaser of the pernicious slave power. Then he ran for president in 1860 as the nominee of the new anti-slavery party against a number of candidate who all warned, accurately, that his election would precipitate secession. Then when his election did precipitate secession, he implemented a policy of military coercion against the seceding states rather than compromise on slavery even though he knew this would prompt even more states to secede. Then he fought and won a war against the seceded states, during the course of which he freed the slaves!

On the other side of the ledger, you have the fact that he spent a lot of time saying that he was only interested in saving the union. But the entire point of the Republican Party was to break the hold of slaveowners over the national government at the cost of provoking sectional conflict. There was a whole other political party—the Democratic Party—organized around the principles of white supremacy and sectional accommodation and it’s a party Lincoln never belonged to.

Back to the present day, this all reminds me of the idea that Paul Ryan is a “deficit hawk.” Sure throughout his career his regularly voting for deficit increasing measures and regularly voted against deficit cutting ones. Sure his budget plan actually cuts taxes on the rich. But he talks a lot about the deficit. So that must be what’s really driving him! Political actors never use rhetoric to try to broaden their coalition and advance their real aims.

The decision to bury the corpse of Osama bin Laden at sea seems almost like an open invitation to conspiracy theorists. The reason for doing it this way is apparently that they didn’t want the site of OBL’s grave to emerge as some kind of shrine/haven for wannabe terrorists. This doesn’t really make sense to me.

The precedent, it seems to me, is the post-mortem treatment of Hitler which has been absolutely dominated by the shrine concern. Consequently, his remains were destroyed in a way that engendered conspiracy theories and the actual location of his death was physically obliterated, just as OBL’s compound has been. But you can’t, of course, erase an actual place from the map and the former site of the Führerbunker is in the middle of Berlin. Anyone who’s curious, whether because they’re a neo-Nazi or just because they’re curious is free to go. And, indeed, I was curious and I went. It’s a parking lot for what I guess is an affordable housing development of some kind (pictured at right) and I don’t think anyone visits it as a shrine to Nazism.

So is this a great policy success, or do neo-Nazis just gather in other places if they feel like it? It seems to me to mostly be the latter. The only people who really suffer from a failure to adequately mark the site are totally innocent people who might be interested. Meanwhile, if people start showing up anywhere to worship at an OBL shrine someplace on the planet, that’d be a great chance to photograph a bunch of suspicious dudes.

The model says if you average out JFK and LBJ you get (roughly speaking) Barack Obama. Common sense says it’s just a wildly different world in 2011 than we had in 1961-68. Compared to Kennedy and Johnson, Obama has positions on gay rights, interracial marriage, and the role of women in society that would have been left-wing radicalism in the sixties. Nobody would be enough of a right-wing maniac these days to propose hiking military spending up to Kennedy/Johnson levels, nor would any American president contemplate unleashing the kind of brutal violence against civilians associated with that era.

Conversely, on the general subject of economic regulation Obama is way to the right of Kennedy and Johnson. In the sixties it was commonplace for federal regulators to set prices in a broad range of industries, marginal tax rates were unthinkably high, etc. Times change.

I’m now prepared to concede that Jamelle Bouie is right and Haley Barbour deserves praise rather than mockery for endorsing Union victory in the Civil War last month. Public Policy Polling’s latest numbers make it clear that this remains a controversial stand in Mississippi in particular and among southern conservatives more generally:

In Georgia 47% of Republicans are content with the Union victory, while 31% wish the South had won. Democrats (58/17) and independents (54/19) are both strongly supportive of the North, making the overall numbers 53/23. In North Carolina GOP voters are almost evenly divided on the outcome of the war with 35% glad for the North’s victory, 33% ruing the South’s loss, and 32% taking neither side. Democrats (55/15) and independents (57/14) have similar numbers to Georgia but due to the greater ambivalence of Republicans about the northern victory, overall less than half of Tar Heel voters (48%) are glad the Union won to 21% who wish the Confederacy had. In Mississippi no group of the electorate seems all that enthused about the North having won. Republicans, by a 38/21 margin, outright wish the South had won. Democrats (39/22) and independents (49/15) side with the North but compared to those voter groups in North Carolina and Georgia they’re pretty ambivalent. Overall just 34% of voters in the state are glad the Union prevailed to 27% who wish the rebels had been victorious.

Absurd as it sounds, this makes it seem like Union victory in the Civil War could be a useful wedge issue for North Carolina Democrat Kay Hagan as she heads into what’s sure to be a very difficult 2014 re-election campaign.

I guess I need to read the book, but maybe first Tyler Cowen could explain to me how Alexander Field’s reinterpretation of the Depression and the War constitutes a change from the liberal conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom, as I understand and embrace it, is that the Great Depression was a gigantic, pointless, wasteful tragedy is which horribly misguided economic policy led to massive idleness and huge shortfalls between actual and potential output. Then came World War II which was even more terrible in its own way, but at least led governments to try to maximize output. Then the war ended, so production could be re-oriented toward making consumer goods but governments had also learned that keeping output near potential is possible and important. The result was massive prosperity. Field writes:

This book is built around a novel claim: potential output grew dramatically across the Depression years (1929-1941), and this advance provided the foundation for the economic and military success of the United States during the Second World War, as well as for what Walt Rostow (1960) called “the age of high mass consumption” that followed. This view, if accepted, leads to important revisions in our understanding of the sources and trajectory of economic growth to the second quarter of the century and, more broadly, over the longer sweep of U.S. economic history since the Civil War.

The claim seems neither especially novel nor to force revisions of anything. It seems to me not only consistent with, but actually identical to, the standard Keynesian account of these events. The Depression was caused by bad demand management and whatever bad supply side policies the Hoover or Roosevelt administration may have engaged in did nothing to change the fact that potential output was growing and poor macro outcomes were driven by demand-side issues.

Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life is a pretty hilarious reading experience. Essentially Chernow understands the Founder Biography genre all too well. The thesis of the book has to be that the subject was a unique genius for whose every sneeze we are indebted. At the same time Chernow gives every indication of in fact being a sophisticated and intelligent man. So time after time you’ll get a clear description of Washington being inept, or grouchy, followed by a sentence about how he was actually being brilliant. The fact that Washington was a giant hypocrite about slavery, who recognized its fundamental wrongness and kept telling French and/or Yankee acquaintances that we was against it but who never lifted a finger out of political opportunism and greed is laid bear, but then excused.

Yet as I say, it’s really all right there on the page. You could have kept 95% of the sentences the same, retitled the book Right Place At The Right Time: The George Washington Story and it’d be brilliant. As written, it’s slightly silly.

What’s more, for whatever reason Chernow has written a narrative that carries a strong subtext of a torrid affair between Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. I can’t do justice to this material, but I would have loved to see a review by Eve Sedgwick. At any rate, like Chernow and Daniel Walker Howe I’m a fan of the Whig and proto-Whig political traditions in America so I give a thumbs up to the idea of this book influencing popular consciousness. Chernow’s op-ed on the tea party is recommended. My own entry into the Founder Bio genre would be titled James Madison: History’s Greatest Monster but I doubt it would achieve bestseller status.

I’ve always thought there was something about the Lincoln administration’s determination to fight and win the Civil War that was a bit odd. Secession gave the regionally based Republican Party large congressional majorities that wouldn’t exist if southern states had representation in congress. What’s more, the Republican Party’s controversial policy objective of banning slavery from the western territories could have been easily achieved by the much more modest policy of simply ensuring military control over the territories. Some fighting in border states such as Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky is easy to understand but why try to reconquer the Deep South?

In an interesting new paper (PDF), Zachary Liskow suggests economic motives were at the root:

Specifically, using voting patterns as representations of the Northern population’s preferences, this paper tests empirically whether the economic motivations of its manufacturing interests might have been important components of Northerners’ support of the decision to fight. The hypothesis that the North had economic motivations for keeping the South in the Union yields a specific prediction: counties with relatively large amounts of these manufacturing interests should shift their votes from Democrats to Republicans between 1860 and 1864. The reason is the following: the best way to keep the South in the Union before the Civil War was to vote for the Democrats, reducing the likelihood of secession by voting for the party more accommodating to Southern slavery interests. However, the best way to keep the South in the Union during the war was to vote for the Republicans, who were more likely to pursue the war until victory was achieved.

Using county-level census data and voting data from the 1860 and 1864 presidential elections, I find that there is a significant shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing employment. This shift toward the Republicans associated with manufacturing together amounts to 2.25% of voters in Northern states; that is, taking the results literally suggests that 2.25% of Northern voters shifted their votes to the Republicans out of a desire to protect their manufacturing interests by keeping the South in the Union.

The basic story here would be something like northern manufacturing interests wanted to keep the southern client base behind the US tariff wall in order to maintain privileged access to the market rather than compete on a level playing field with British goods.