While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.
Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.
To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs.
Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”
Officials and free trade advocates in both Britain and Canada also understood the implications of the McKinley Tariff. Members of the Cobden Club, a prominent and influential London-based free-trade organization, called it an “outrage on civilization”—one that promised “to lead to the [American] annexation of Canada.” British Liberal Lyon Playfair warned that the law looked like “a covert attack on Canada.” If the tariff act’s objective “really be (as the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, thinks) to force the United States lion and the Canadian lamb to lie down together, this can only be accomplished by the lamb being inside the lion,” he warned.
Yet, though both sides were convinced that the tariff would drive Canada into the arms of the U.S., it actually had the opposite effect. Nationalistic Canadians argued that the tariff was “a heavy blow struck alike at our home industries and at the prosperity and independence of the Dominion of Canada — an unprovoked aggression, an attempt at conquest by fiscal war.”