Is the Boston Tea Party Over?

The article presents information on the book "Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism," by Dana Frank. Buying American, as University of California historian Dana Frank's illuminating history reveals, has been a rallying cry for millions in this country ever since Paul Revere and his cohorts, faces blackened, boarded the ships of the East India Company monopoly and clogged Boston Harbor with 90,000 pounds of imported tea. Frank shows how, in the decades and centuries that followed the famous tea party, the movement has always had a fascinating cross-class composition: Wealthy entrepreneurs joined with workers to wrap themselves in the American flag of consumption. One result of this multiclass alliance from 1773 to the present, as Frank points out, is that "as often as not, their visions of the just economy" are "in conflict with each other."