Culture Wars: The U.S. Art Lobby and Congressional Tariff Legislation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Abstract

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.