Sugar Industry dates back to the very founding of the New World, and has been intricately entangled with its history. Because of its role in the slave trade, sugar played an important role not only in the economy but also in how social relations developed in the New World. In the infamous "triangle trade," English colonies in the Caribbean shipped sugar to England for refining, and the products went to Africa where traders exchanged them for slaves, who were brought to the Caribbean plantations to raise more sugar. Sugar plantation work was among the most brutal and dangerous, as workers labored in oppressive heat and swampy conditions, and with dangerous tools.
Brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, sugar cane was first cultivated successfully in Louisiana around the middle of the eighteenth century. Although efforts to make sugar from the cane juice succeeded in Louisiana as early as 1760 and in Florida a few years later, until the 1790s cane was cultivated in small quantities, mainly for the manufacture of syrup and rum. The spectacular success of a wealthy Louisiana planter, Jean É tienne Boré, in making sugar on a substantial scale in 1795 was followed in the next years by a rapid shift of planters from indigo to sugarcane. When the United States took possession of Louisiana in 1803, there was already a small but thriving sugar industry in south Louisiana. Likewise, when the United States acquired Puerto Rico and Hawaii in 1898, sugar culture was already well established in both areas. Though Slavery in the United States ended after the Civil War, sugar producers continued to keep sugar workers in slave-like conditions in parts of the South, supported by government programs.
The need for cane sugar laborers was a key reason that seventeenth-century plantation owners in the Caribbean began importing slaves, and the labor-intensive character of sugar growing later encouraged planters in the U.S. South to hold large numbers of slaves. Climatic conditions in the southern United States were not as favorable for cane culture as those of the West Indies, because of shorter growing seasons and the danger of freezes. Nevertheless, as a result of the availability of enslaved workers, a protective tariff, the introduction of cold-resistant cane varieties, the adoption of steam power for grinding cane, and advances in the processes of clarification and evaporation of cane juice, the cane sugar industry grew rapidly in the years prior to the Civil War. Major improvements were made in the manufacture of sugar, including the introduction in the 1820s of steam power for crushing cane and the invention in the 1840s by Norbert Rillieux, a Louisiana Creole, of a multiple-effect system for evaporating cane juice, which replaced the open kettle boilers and revolutionized sugar manufacture. Although cane was grown for syrup mainly on small farms in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, only on the large plantations in south Louisiana and Texas was a successful sugar industry established. In 1850, on plantations worked by slaves, the southern states produced almost 114,000 tons of cane sugar, approximately one-half of the sugar consumed in the United States. Prior to 1861, most Louisiana cane sugar was shipped to cities throughout the Mississippi Valley and the East Coast, and much of it was consumed in the form of raw sugar. Refiners in eastern cities imported raw sugar from the West Indies and, by a refining process of melting the sugar, clarifying the juice in boneblack filters, and centrifugal drying, produced a dry, white sugar.
Beets, the other principle source for the sugar industry, have only in the twentieth century become a widespread source, though attempts at making beet sugar date centuries back. Sugar beets, which probably grew wild in Asia, were cultivated at an early time in Egypt and southern Europe. A German chemist, Andreas Marggraf, demonstrated in 1747 that sugar from beets was identical with cane sugar. Early in the nineteenth century, when France was cut off from overseas sugar supplies, Napoleon Bonaparte established the sugar beet industry. Although the industry declined with Napoleon's downfall, it gradually revived, spreading first to Germany and then to much of the rest of Europe.
One reason that the beet sugar industry was established so slowly in the United States is the large amount of hand labor required in growing beets; because of where beets grew, their growers could not rely on enslaved labor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cultivation of sugar beets spread throughout the central and western states from the Great Lakes to California, and in both cane and beet processing, large expensive central mills came to dominate the manufacture of sugar. Four small beet sugar factories were constructed between 1838 and 1856, but all failed. The first successful one was established by E. H. Dyer at Alvarado, California (twentytwo miles east of San Francisco), in 1870 and operated through 1967. The next successful plants were established in Watsonville, California (1888); Grand Island, Nebraska (1890); and Lehi, Utah (1891). During the 1870s, Maine and Delaware offered a bonus for beet sugar manufactured within their limits, and factories destined to operate only a few years were built at Portland and Wilmington, respectively. The Portland factory inaugurated the practice of contracting with farmers for a specific acreage of sugar beets that would be raised from seed furnished by the company. This plan of operation, adapted from French practices, has persisted to the present. Despite the activity in Maine and Delaware, production in the United States has tended to concentrate in irrigated areas in the West.
By 1910 more beet than cane sugar was produced in the continental United States. In 1920 the output exceeded one million tons, and in 1972 it was about 3.5 million tons, which was more than one-fourth of the sugar consumed in the United States. In the 1970s, some sixty plants were producing beet sugar in eighteen states, with more than one-third of the total factory capacity located in California and Colorado. During the 1930s, studies began on the mechanization of growing and harvesting beets. Since World War II, mechanical devices have replaced much of the handcutting of cane, as machines for planting, cultivating, and harvesting beets—all requiring specialized technological changes—were developed by the beginning of World War II, and their adoption was hastened by shortages of hand labor during the war and by postwar prosperity.
By the 1960s, the refining branch of the sugar industry was dominated by large corporations and was concentrated in coastal cities, especially New York, New Orleans, Savannah, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco. Refiners process raw sugar from Louisiana, Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and foreign countries. Refined sugar was marketed in more than one hundred varieties of grades and packaging to meet highly specialized demands. Per capita sugar consumption in the United States increased rapidly during the twentieth century and by the 1970s had been stabilized at about one hundred pounds per year. Although sugar production in Texas ended in the 1920s, a thriving modern sugar industry emerged in Florida south of Lake Okeechobee.
Since 1934 the U.S. government has assisted the sugar industry, which has a powerful lobby. Until the late twentieth century, sugar growers had access to extremely lowpaid, non-unionized immigrant workers through a federal "guest worker" program for the industry. In the early twenty-first century, the sugar industry was receiving $1.6 billion from the U.S. government. Rather than making direct payments to growers, as the Agriculture Department does in other industries, the department gives sugar processors short-term loans, and maintains high domestic prices by strictly limiting imports. Critics of this policy note that sugar consumers pay two to three times the world market price. In fiscal year 2000, domestic growers grew more than the government-set limit, and the government had to spend $465 million to buy their excess sugar and cover the cost of processors' loan forfeitures. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political campaign contributions, the sugar industry contributes more than one-third of the money that crop production and food processing interests spend on political campaigns. The industry has a growing U.S. market; sugar consumption has practically doubled in the past century, from 86 pounds per U.S. citizen to nearly 160. However, the fortunes of the U.S. sugar industry may change in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as Mexican imports are likely to flood the U.S. market beginning in fiscal 2004.
Bibliography
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