Protectionism Essay Contest
The Jones Act: Help or Harm
The Coolidge Foundation’s 2025 Essay Contest is now open! [WILL LINK TO PORTAL]
The contest asks you to consider the topic of protectionism, and in particular a century-old protectionist measure known as the Jones Act.
You may find the following resources helpful in your research. Of course, you may augment these materials with additional research if you like:
- Jones Act overview (Legal Information Institute)
- “A Century of the Jones Act,” Sea History, Winter 2019–20
- “The Great Jones Act Debate,” Bloomberg Odd Lots, March 20, 2025: audio │ transcript
“The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 is an earnest effort to lay the foundation of a policy that will build up and maintain an adequate American merchant marine in competition with the shipping of the world….
“Our shipping could be done more cheaply by others, and so we had none. When the war came this lack of shipping cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in higher freight rates or business losses and hundreds of millions of waste in the hasty building of ships to meet the emergency that threatened the overthrow of civilization, and today the papers are filled with stories of waste, corruption and inefficiency that was the inevitable result of the conditions and the situation that confronted us.
“The man or the paper who would discourage the upbuilding of our merchant marine is fighting the battle of alien interests.”
- Senator Wesley Jones, August 11, 1920 (quoted in the New York Times):
“Before the war we had to depend on foreign ships for our business. We had to go to our competitors to get our goods to market. Do you help your competitors fight you? Foreign lines gave the advantage to themselves. When you get an advantage do you give it to your competitor, I ask you? That’s what we had to expect and that’s what we got. That is what we must continue to expect if we continue along these same ideas of the old policy.
“I want ships to fly the American flag on the Pacific. There are interests in this country that do not want it. Our Canadian friends are looking after their interests. There is nobody nowadays to look after American interests except we Americans ourselves. It is said this bill will drive foreign shipping from our ports. Granted. I want to do it.”
“The previous Congress, deeply concerned in behalf of our merchant marine, in 1920 enacted the existing shipping law, designed for the upbuilding of the American merchant marine. Among other things provided to encourage our shipping on the world’s seas, the Executive was directed to give notice of the termination of all existing commercial treaties in order to admit of reduced duties on imports carried in American bottoms. During the life of the act no Executive has complied with this order of the Congress. When the present administration came into responsibility it began an early inquiry into the failure to execute the expressed purpose of the Jones Act. Only one conclusion has been possible. Frankly, Members of House and Senate, eager as I am to join you in the making of an American merchant marine commensurate with our commerce, the denouncement of our commercial treaties would involve us in a chaos of trade relationships and add indescribably to the confusion of the already disordered commercial world. Our power to do so is not disputed, but power and ships, without comity of relationship, will not give us the expanded trade which is inseparably linked with a great merchant marine. Moreover, the applied reduction of duty, for which the treaty denouncements were necessary, encouraged only the carrying of dutiable imports to our shores, while the tonnage which unfurls the flag on the seas is both free and dutiable, and the cargoes which make it nation eminent in trade are outgoing, rather than incoming….
“The executive branch of the Government, uninfluenced by the protest of any nation, for none has been made, is well convinced that your proposal, highly intended and heartily supported here, is so fraught with difficulties and so marked by tendencies to discourage trade expansion, that I invite your tolerance of noncompliance for only a few weeks until a plan may be presented which contemplates no greater draft upon the Public Treasury, and which, though yet too crude to offer it to-day, gives such promise of expanding our merchant marine, that it will argue its own approval.”
- “Why Senator Jones Differs from Coolidge,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington), January 22, 1928:
“We must choose between a government merchant marine or no marine at all.”
- The Case Against the Jones Act (Cato Institute, 2020): book available for purchase. As an alternative, students can consider reading this essay, available for free online, written by the editors of the book.