Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 5
We often hear solemn pronouncements about the need to learn the “lessons of history.” But which ones? A single event can offer a variety of lessons.
I was powerfully reminded of this when, around the start of this year, a great battle over beef appeared to be brewing between the United States and the European Community. The member nations of the EC were preparing to halt imports of American beef from animals treated with hormones to speed up and increase their growth. European health authorities forbid the practice to their own farmers, even though it enhances profits.
U.S. officials issued bristling rejoinders. Americans, they said, showed no ill effects from the meat in question. The alleged “health issue” was a shield behind which the EC was wrongfully imposing a protective tariff. The United States could and would strike back. TRADE RETALIATION READIED IF EUROPE BARS MEATS OF U.S. , said one headline. Was the United States defending its farmers in a fair fight? Or trying to bully other governments out of their duty to protect their own people as they saw fit?
As I read these stories, a phrase kept ringing in my head: “Pork War.” Dimly I remembered that in the 1880s the German government had shut out imports of meat from American hogs, thereby inducing considerable outrage and threats of economic counterattack in Washington. I recalled the story as having vague medical overtones but basically describing a tariff encounter.
Was my memory right? I dialed the number of Walter Nugent, who specializes in late-nineteenth-century U.S. history, and asked. He told me I was wrong—along with the previous writers on the subject on whom I had relied. But no matter. I had hit pay dirt in the form of a new story, far more interesting than what I thought I knew.
Nugent, it turned out, was co-author of an article on the very subject of the Pork War, appearing in the June 1989 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine . His collaborator, Suellen Hoy, works in the new field of public history—basically the development of governmental institutions. Dr. Nugent and Dr. Hoy both teach at Notre Dame, are good friends of mine, and are also husband and wife.
Unlike previous researchers, they took seriously Germany’s claim that its ban on American pork was not a tariff but a step in disease control. That put an entirely new face on the old saga of the battle of economic giants. As they tracked their way through medical and diplomatic literature, they began to see instead a picture of a modern health-related bureaucracy slowly and clumsily emerging in the two nations.
What the German government feared in 1881 was trichinosis, a disease caused by a tiny parasitic roundworm, trichina (or Trichinella spiralis ), which lives in the muscle tissue of some swine. The symptoms