I agree with Lou -- the boycott of American goods can serve a good purpose if it is organized abroad. There are historical precedents -- e.g., the nonimportation movement that preceded the American Revolution:
***** People become radicalized by their own political actions, as the Green Mountain Boys so clearly demonstrated. Particular acts of oppression can motivate them, pamphlets and propaganda might stir them, but it is the engagement in collective and purposive activity that turns ordinary people into revolutionaries.
American patriots from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were willing to wage war in 1775 and declare their independence in 1776 because they had participated for the better part of a decade in what would appear as a simple and nonviolent political protest: an economic boycott of British imported goods. Although the riots also played a part, all the Stamp Act protests and tea parties and Regulator movements and land uprisings, even when considered together, involved only a modest fraction of the colonial populace. The nonimportation movement, by contrast, involved the majority of free Americans in one manner or another. On the most basic level, many citizens agreed to refrain from specified private behavior: the consumption of British imports. But private behavior, in this case, was imbued with a great deal of public meaning. By agreeing not to buy certain products, a man or a woman took a stance in support of a well-defined political program. A person did not have to cast a vote or tear down a mansion in order to make a statement. Even those who could never afford imported goods in the first place were able to participate by forcing others to comply.
Nonimportation started as a response to the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765. By reducing their trade in luxury items, such as the gloves given out at funerals, and by forestalling on payment of debts, merchants in Boston and other port towns hoped to place economic pressure on their British trading partners. The strategy was simple: create a constituency in England that would push for the repeal of colonial taxation. The effects of nonimportation would be felt throughout the British economy: facing decreased demand, glove makers and weavers in England would be forced to lay off workers, who would then riot. John Adams wrote: "I'd rather the Spittlefield weavers should pull down all the houses in old England, and knock the brains out of all the wicked men there, than this country should lose their liberty."
The strategy worked. Unemployed workers in England started rioting. On January 17, 1766, a group of London merchants, claiming that the collapse of their colonial trade was leading them to "utter ruin," pleaded with Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. Merchants from other British towns presented similar petitions, and in March the Stamp Act was repealed.
When the Townshend Acts of 1767 placed new duties on glass, lead, paint, tea, and paper, Whig leaders again promoted nonimportation as an acceptable alternative to mob violence. The movement was initiated by merchants, but agreements soon circulated "among the people for general signing." Artisans and laborers, hoping to spur the development of local manufacturing, enthusiastically embraced nonimportation. Patriots in Charleston followed Boston's example by holding meetings which were as "full...as possible" so that their resolutions would be seen as "_the sense of the Whole Body_."
As participation broadened, however, the nature of the movement changed. A 1768 agreement in Boston had requested only that the signers "give a constant preference" to merchants who refrained from importation; two years later, Bostonians voted to withhold "for ever hereafter...not only all commercial Dealings, but every Act and Office of Common Civility" to four men who refused to participate. In Virginia, millers refused to grind the corn of an Anglican minister who had preached against "the danger and sin of rebellion," while doctors declined to treat his sick wife and children. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, advocates of nonimportation pledged "never [to] have any fellowship or correspondence" with importers or the consumers of imported goods and to "publish his or their names to the world...as a lasting monument to infamy." In a society tightly bound within well-defined communities, social ostracism served as a potent weapon.
Large and vocal crowds which visited the homes of nonparticipants had "a more powerful Effect in reducing...such Culprits to Reason than the most convincing Arguments that could be used." In July of 1769, the erection of a scaffold finally convinced Thomas Richardson, a New York jeweller, to comply with nonimportation. In Boston, the "Signs, Doors and Windows" of nonsubscribers "were daub'd over in the Night time with every kind of Filth, and one of them particularly had his person treated in the same manner." In October of 1769, Nathaniel Rogers finally agreed to comply "from principles of self-preservation" after his house had twice been "besmeared" with dung. Nonimportation, originally touted as a nonviolent alternative to rioting, had come full circle to embrace mob actions.
The revolutionary implications of this sort of behavior were profound. Nonimportation committees commandeered police and judicial functions when they marched into merchants' quarters, inspected invoices, judged the offenders, and administered punishments. The usurpation of such powers was validated by maintaining a broad public base: all actions became legitimate if they were performed in the name of "the whole body of the people." When the old laws weren't working, Sam Adams declared, the "will and pleasure of society" had to be imposed directly. But who could speak for the will and pleasure of society? The people who came together to sign the agreements. The nonimportation associations -- "binding on each and all" of the signers, in the words of the Virginia Association of 1770 -- functioned as legal compacts. If governments were indeed social contracts as John Locke maintained, the association could lay a stronger claim to legitimacy than the British Crown.
Nonimportation succeeded again, just as it had during the Stamp Act crisis: the Townshend duties, with the exception of a token tax on tea, were repealed in April 1770. Having achieved its major goal, the nonimportation movement temporarily subsided. Early in 1774, however, when Parliament responded to the Boston Tea Party by passing the "Coercive Acts" -- closing the Boston Harbor, making all Massachusetts officials responsible only to the Crown, and giving added powers to the occupying army -- colonial resistance galvanized as never before. The Virginia assembly set aside June 1, the date of the Boston port closure, as a day of fasting and prayer. When the governor answered by dissolving the assembly, members moved to the Raleigh Tavern and continued their meeting. If Parliament could isolate Massachusetts and bring it to its knees, the assembly reasoned, they could subdue Virginia as well. It was time for the American colonists to stand together.
Patriots in other colonies agreed, and on September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Most history texts note the forceful manner in which the delegates petitioned the British government; of more significance than their rhetoric, however, was their decision to form a single "Continental Association" to implement -- and enforce -- a sweeping nonimportation, nonexportation, and nonconsumption agreement for all the colonies. Crossing regional boundaries and class distinctions, the association, as it came to be called, became the voice, and force, of revolutionary America.
The key to the association lay in its implementation, outlined in section eleven:
That a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are qualified to vote for representatives in the legislature, whose business it shall be attentively to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association; and when it shall be made to appear, to the satisfaction of a majority of any such committee, that any person...has violated this association, that such majority do forthwith cause the truth of the case to be published in the gazzette; to the end, that all such foes to the rights of British-America may be publicly known, and universally contemned as the enemies of American liberty; and thenceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.
The association took effect immediately as "every county, city, and town" formed their committees. These committees commanded far greater power than the "Committee of Correspondence" which had been spreading patriot propaganda and organizing protests. Selected by "the body of the people," they claimed a quasi-legitimate authority over all matters pertaining to political conduct. And in 1774 nearly everything _did_ pertain to politics -- not only what people said, but what people bought and sold, produced or consumed. In each local community the "committee" enforced the standards of proper revolutionary behavior. No village, family, or individual would remain unaffected by the political, social, and economic convulsions sweeping the colonies.
Despite the wishful thinking of moderate Whigs, violence, both implied and real, lay behind the enforcement of the association by the committees -- and the violence was intrinsic to its structure, even if not explicitly advocated. What was likely to happen to people who had been advertised in the newspapers as "enemies of American liberty"? The committee in Skenesborough, New York, published the name of an opponent of the association, announcing that "[we] hereby give notice to the public that he may be treated with all that neglect and contempt which is so justly his due."
"Neglect" meant ostracism, but what might "contempt" entail? The "popular Punishment for modern delinquents" during the revolutionary era was tarring and feathering:
The following is the Recipe for an effectual Operation: "First, strip a Person naked, then heat the Tar until it is thin, & pour it upon the naked Flesh, or rub it over with a Tar Brush....After which, sprinkle decently upon the Tar, whilst it is yet warm, as many Feathers as will stick to it. Then hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, & try to set it all on Fire; if it will burn so much the better. But as the Experiment is often made in cold Weather; it will not then succeed -- take also an Halter & put it round the Person's Neck, & then art him the Rounds.
When the victim tried to remove the tar, he ripped off some skin as well, exposing himself to widespread infection. After John Malcolm was tarred and feathered because of his argument with George Hewes, Malcolm's doctors reported that "his flesh comes off his back in Stakes."...
The mere threat of a tarring and feathering generally sufficed to procure a repentance. In Norfork, Virginia, those accused of opposing the association were made to stand next to a pole, with a bag of feathers attached to the top and a barrel of hot tar underneath. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, "a disciple of that species of creatures called _Tories_" was "formally introduced to a tar-barrel, of which he was repeatedly pressed to smell." The confessions offered under this sort of pressure were always made in public, reaffirming the dominance of community values over private interests....
Despite the objections to the "mob" so often voiced by respectable citizens, tarring and feathering gained a quasi-official acceptance as a legitimate mode of punishment. A letter from a New Yorker, after describing the tarring and feathering of Thomas Randolph in Quibble Town, New Jersey, boasted that "the whole was conducted with that regularity and decorum, that ought to be preserved in all public punishments."...Sometimes a few gentlemen might try to intervene, but as the rebellion progressed, the distinction between "committee" and "mob" became blurred....Participants were complimented rather than condemned for behavior which normally would be considered rowdy at best, criminal at worst -- and they seem to enjoy themselves in the festival-like atmosphere which accompanied the inflicting of bodily harm upon a common enemy....
Tarring and feathering, however crude and sadistic, fostered a sense of political involvement for the common people of the times, allowing them to participate -- and prevail -- in public affairs. The pot of tar at the bottom of a liberty pole: two potent symbols that went hand in hand. Buttressed by a sense of righteousness and feeling secure in their numbers, plain farmers, laborers, seamen, artisans, apprentices, teenagers, and servants helped to determine the course of events. Many couldn't vote, but they could all engage in "out-of-doors" politics, a term denoting any form of civic activity that was not officially sanctioned by law: caucuses, conventions, committees, and mobs. The vigor with which the association was enforced, and the vitality of the military mobilization that followed, were due in part to the obvious pleasure which ordinary people took in exercising their new-found powers.
(Ray Raphael, _A People's Hisotry of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence_, Perenial, 2002 [first published by the New Press in 2001], pp. 38-45) *****
In short, successful boycotts require festive collective enforcement mechanisms -- committees and direct actions, buttressed by the press, savored by gossips at popular hangouts like taverns, and sanctioned by religious authorities when such authorities matter in popular attitudes -- that encourage popular participation and allow the populace to take pleasure in their "new-found powers," in the process politicizing all. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>