Giles B. Stebbins

Giles Badger Stebbins (1817-1900) was born June 12, 1817, in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father, Eldad Stebbins, served for over twenty years as a paymaster for the Springfield Armory. The Stebbins family resided on the Armory grounds, where they received free housing from the United States government. The elder Stebbins would later resign from his position in the Armory due to ill health. In 1832, around the age of fifteen, Giles would become a clerk at a hardware store in Springfield. It was here that Stebbins first began to take an interest in American industry. Having noticed that almost all the tools and other supplies sold at the store were English made, Stebbins questioned why these tools could not be produced in the United States.

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In his youthful years, Stebbins would become engrossed in transcendentalism, and mingled briefly with the communes based upon the ideas of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. One such commune was Brookfield Farm, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, not far from where Stebbins resided. Although Stebbins never became a member of the commune, he occasionally attended educational classes by several notable teachers there.

Stebbins would later recall that in spite of it working for a short while, the commune eventually unraveled due to poor management and systematic inefficiencies. Stebbins recollected how one member joked that “in [an] association you must learn to work for lazy folks,” and his own observation drew similar conclusions. Reflecting on the failure of the association, Stebbins wrote that “one of the best things for a young man sometimes is to find out how little he knows. It takes down his self-conceit and settles him into deeper thinking. At the association I had that lesson.”

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Even though Stebbins was inclined towards protection early in life, it would not be until the outbreak of the American Civil War, that he took more of an interest in the matter. Being an abolitionist since his youth, Stebbins had already taken issue with the Confederates States for their support of slavery, but increasingly, Stebbins saw free trade as the second pillar of the Confederacy. This prompted Stebbins to investigate the matter more thoroughly, and in 1865, he would produce his first protectionist pamphlet entitled British Free Trade Delusion. It was also around this time that Stebbins became involved with the American Iron and Steel Association, having befriended the Association’s founder, E. B. Ward, in 1863. In 1866, Stebbins would be elected as the Assistant Secretary of the Association. In this capacity, Stebbins continued to produce numerous pamphlets on protection, which would be circulated by the Association. Stebbins’ more scholarly works on political economy would not appear until quite later. The first of these was his 1887 work Progress from Poverty, which was a critique of Henry George. His more important and significant work would then appear in 1893. This was his treatise The American Protectionist’s Manual, which was designed “to present the leading principles and facts” on the question of protection in a “readable and useful” way. In 1892, Stebbins would also become the editor of The American Economist, which was the journal of the American Protective Tariff League. This was a position which he would occupy for two years. At the age of eighty three, Stebbins would pass away in his home in Detroit in early November 1900.