Why Trump’s ‘Buy American’ Campaign Won’t Improve the US Economy

When a horde of angry colonists barged aboard ships in Boston Harbor to pitch hundreds of chests of imported tea into the water, some of them suspected they were fomenting a revolution. They probably didn’t realize they were also galvanizing a marketing campaign that would endure for centuries.

Photograph by Matthew Xavier Praley for Bloomberg Businessweek

The Boston Tea Party was the pinnacle of the “nonimportation movement,” in which colonists protested British rule by boycotting goods from overseas and shaming others into doing the same. For early Americans, this outburst of economic nationalism was existential: It helped spread the view that England was an outside enemy and ...