Smuggler Nation (32 page)

Books were also smuggled in to meet the demands of a rapidly growing reading public. In one smuggling operation, the book shipment was first sent from London to a broker in Montreal and then smuggled across the border into the United States.
³⁸
But more often books were simply copied and reprinted in complete disregard of foreign copyright claims. After all, why bother smuggling in multiple copies of bulky books to get around high tariffs—typically 25 percent on books—when an American publisher could simply copy and reprint them cheaply without permission from the original publisher or author? The tariff created yet another incentive to engage in copyright piracy. In the nineteenth century the United States was notorious as “the foremost haven for international copyright piracy” in the
world.
³⁹
American copyright law did not protect most of the works of foreign authors until 1891, and even then piracy remained common.
⁴⁰
Intellectual piracy in the publishing business was greatly aided by significant improvements in printing technology that made books and other publications much easier and cheaper to reproduce. The brazenness and magnitude of American reprinting outraged not only foreign publishers but also authors such as Charles Dickens, who pleaded for decades for U.S. copyright protection.
⁴¹
British author Wilkie Collins bitterly accused the Americans of making “robbery” into “the basis of national aggrandizement.”
⁴²

Smuggling schemes carried out by steamship passengers were as varied as they were ingenious. Virtually anything could be used as a smuggling device: trunks with false bottoms and other hidden compartments, hollow canes and heels, and even infants and children. In one case, a boy was walking so stiffly and awkwardly that he caught the attention of an inspector at the New York port of entry. It turned out that the child had silver spoons sewn into his clothes, making it impossible for him to bend.
⁴³

Travelers returning from shopping sprees in Europe would often hide items inside their clothing, from hat to heel and everywhere in between. One Chicago smuggler somehow managed to stuff 42 chains, 112 diamonds, and 43 pearls in his boots—which were many sizes larger than his exceptionally small feet.
⁴⁴
On-the-body smuggling even included dead bodies: one smuggler shipping a casket from abroad confessed to having placed forty-three rings on a dead man’s fingers (the dead man was his brother). When informed by the authorities that what he was doing was smuggling, he simply replied, “Why, everybody that I know does it.”
⁴⁵

Women smugglers were especially advantaged since they could conveniently stuff items inside overflowing dresses and elaborate hats and hairdos. As
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
described it, “As smugglers, women are more successful than men. The complications of their dress favor the business.”
⁴⁶
Usually this involved small items such as diamonds, pearls, jewelry, or watch chains, but in one case a woman was even caught trying to smuggle thirteen boxes of cigars under her dress.
⁴⁷
Another woman wrapped her body in several thousand yards of expensive laces. When discovered, she insisted she was not smuggling but just trying to stay warm.
⁴⁸
In another case, a woman was caught
wearing a double-quilted petticoat filled with Shetland shawls, caps, and stockings.
⁴⁹
The female clothing advantage diminished over time as women’s fashion styles changed to tighter-fitting dresses, making it more difficult to hide smuggled items.

To handle the growing number of female smugglers, Customs hired women to search for contraband carried on the body. In March 1908, women inspectors estimated that more than half of the female passengers arriving from foreign ports were hiding dutiable goods somewhere on their persons.
⁵⁰
Women who engaged in smuggling ranged from part-time amateurs to hired couriers to sophisticated professionals devising their own elaborate schemes. One of the most successful was Sophie Lyons, nicknamed “Queen of the Crooks” for her various criminal exploits; later in her career she made a small fortune in diamond smuggling. A 1902 headline in the
Los Angeles Times
called her the “Country’s Greatest Woman Crook.”
⁵¹

The emergence and growth of the international tourism industry, enabled by much faster and more accessible travel via steamship, created far greater opportunities for petty smuggling and a growing headache for customs inspectors. At the turn of the century, almost 125,000 American tourists traveled overseas (nearly all to Europe), four times the number of travelers three decades earlier.
⁵²
The number of American tourists traveling to Europe was double that number on the eve of World War I. Many viewed European destinations as not only a holiday adventure but also a shopping expedition, with the length of the transatlantic crossing—dubbed the “six-day pond”—drastically shortened by the steamship.
⁵³

American travelers were increasingly mobile, but so too were law enforcers. By the turn of the century, special Treasury Department agents were deployed to five European cities, headquartered in Paris, with tasks that included tracking big-spending Americans and informing inspectors back home what to look out for in the luggage on the return trip. The agents also kept busy trying to determine the true value of items (ranging from gloves to jewelry) to verify that American shoppers were making truthful value declarations when arriving back home.
⁵⁴
As the New Orleans
Times-Democrat
reported, “The Treasury finds it profitable to maintain in the leading European cities agents to watch out for purchases of small articles of great value by Americans visiting abroad, and
if the traveling American buys a tiara of diamonds or an expensive set of furs the chances are that the Treasury agents will know the purchase in a few hours.”
⁵⁵

Figure 10.2 “Home from the Old World—Examination of Baggage by CustomHouse officers on a New York steamship wharf,”
Harper’s Weekly
, March 29, 1879 (John Hay Library, Brown University).

Customs agents enjoyed enormous discretion, leeway, and authority in carrying out their daily tasks. Indeed, the invasive power of the federal government in peacetime was nowhere greater or more concentrated than in customs inspections. Searches required no probable cause or warrant; mere suspicion was sufficient—and everyone was plausibly a suspect. As one headline in the
New York Times
read, “Law Stands Behind the Customs Officer,” followed by the subhead “His Authority to Examine and Search a Suspected Smuggler is Almost Limitless.”
⁵⁶
In this regard, the policing power of the American state over citizens and noncitizens alike was most evident and concentrated at border points of entry.
⁵⁷

Highly intrusive and time-consuming customs inspections were the source of considerable anxiety, anger, and frustration among tourists and merchants alike. As the
Boston Herald
noted, “Nothing tends to make a man a free-trader as a few little bouts with the Custom
House, and even the sounder protectionists are now and then caught smuggling.”
⁵⁸
One prominent New York merchant went so far as to denounce the inspection process as “a system of terrorism”—though he had particular reason to complain given that his company was implicated in undervaluing imports.
⁵⁹
Frequent grumbling about invasive and unreasonable customs procedures resonated widely. In one case, an overeager customs inspector provoked not only complaints but
ridicule when he went so far as to snatch a four-ounce chocolate bar out of the hands of a fourteen-year-old girl at the New York port for failure to pay duty (the chocolate bar was returned).
⁶⁰

Figure 10.3 “Another Hold-Up. This is the way Uncle Sam treats his own.” Cover of
Life magazine
, May 4, 1899, depicting the treatment of returning American passengers by customs inspectors (John Hay Library, Brown University).

Americans from all walks of life enjoyed finding a good bargain, and evading the tariff could mean a steep discount. Even the superrich, who could most afford to pay duty, often took their chances at playing the smuggling game. A pearl necklace purchased at Tiffany & Company in Paris for tens of thousands of dollars was certainly expensive. But for some, the possibility of evading the 60 percent U.S. tariff made it an all-too-tempting bargain.
⁶¹
Less-high-end smugglers even found fake pearls—with a 20 percent import duty—attractive. This included, for example, the professional smuggler Ferdinand Block, who allegedly used Providence, Rhode Island, as a distribution hub for thousands of illicitly imported fake pearls.
⁶²

When the rich and famous were caught smuggling, it often caused them great embarrassment. In one case prominently reported in the
New York Times
, the former governor of New Hampshire along with his wife and son were arrested for smuggling.
⁶³
In another case reported in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, a Chicago millionaire caught smuggling insisted that the seized items—including pearl and diamond brooches, jewel boxes, and gold watches—were intended as Sunday school presents.
⁶⁴

Highly publicized cases of inspectors busting wealthy travelers for smuggling projected an image of government fairness and impartiality. At the same time, ethnic and racial profiling was both routine and accepted—with Jews and Chinese especially targeted, harassed, and crudely stereotyped as predisposed to engage in smuggling. They typically received extra scrutiny and more intensive inspections, including full-body searches.
⁶⁵

Bitter battles over the tariff question included denouncing smugglers, but also sometimes defending them. One prominent New York reformer, David A. Wells, even outdid Adam Smith in portraying the smuggler as “the knight-errant of civilization,” who, acting “in disregard of the law, and sustained in a high degree of popular opinion … compels the letting down of barriers by which a false political economy seeks to isolate nation from nation.”
⁶⁶
In this view, the smuggler was at the forefront of bringing America and the world closer together.
At the same time, those who defended the tariff and denounced the smuggler reflected not just industrial interests but nationalist anxieties about bringing America and the world too closely together. These intense political debates over the tariff and its evasion, Cohen suggests, reflected America’s deep ambivalence about globalization.
⁶⁷

THE COMBINATION OF HIGH
tariff walls, rapidly expanding trade and transportation links to the outside world, and a flourishing consumer culture translated into extraordinary incentives and opportunities for tax-evading smuggling in America’s Gilded Age. In 1869,
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
warned, “it is the opinion of men experienced in trade and political economy that we will soon become a nation of smugglers.”
⁶⁸
Overlooked in this pronouncement, of course, was that America had been a nation of smugglers from the very start. But by the first decades of the twentieth century it was a much more mature—and vastly richer and more powerful—smuggler nation. Sixty years after the prediction published in
Harper’s
, a May 1929 article in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
asked: “Are we a nation of smugglers? The answer is that we are, if the 800,000 Americans who annually journey abroad may be regarded a fair cross section of our population.” Indeed, petty smugglers came from all ethnicities and classes. The article went on to note that U.S. customs officials estimated some three-quarters of travelers returning from foreign trips were engaged in some form of smuggling, and that a mere 5 percent were probably caught.
⁶⁹
Regardless of the accuracy of these numbers, U.S. customs agents clearly thought that smuggling had become as American as apple pie.