HOW BROWNSVILLE SCRAP METAL FED JAPANESE IMPERIALISM

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

If you have just received your electronic copy "Port Matters," of the glossy magazine from the port of Brownsville, there is a notation there referring to the history of the port after its opening in 1936.

 In passing, it notes that "The Brownsville Herald archives indicate that in 1937, nearly one year after the initial opening, British freighter Antigone called on the nascent port to load 4,000 tons of scrap metal from Brownsville Iron and Metal company and ship it to Japan. The Antigone was the first British flagged vessel to call on the Port of Brownsville."

In those days, with the port barely opening the year before, there was no shipbreaking industry here as there is today. Where the Brownsville Iron and Metal was able to gather 4,000 tons of scap metal is anyone's guess, since in 1937 there were no nearby steel factories or large junkyards that we know about.

Today, that is very different. In fact, Brownsville is just about the only place where ship breaking is taking place in the United States, according to an industry website.

"In the United States most shipbreaking has been consolidated along the 17-mile shipping channel leading to the Port of Brownsville,Texas, near Mexico, where much of the resulting scrap is processed, while a small yard at Port Colborne, Ontario handles some Canadian and Great Lakes ships."

Thousands of tons of steel will be stripped and recycled and sent to smelt shops and steel mills a few hours away by rail in Monterrey, Mexico. Much of it will eventually return to the U.S. as remnants of old war cruisers and merchant marine ships reborn as auto parts and appliances.

All of the steel coming to town in the form of hulking Navy vessels (as well as oil rigs and other ships) has made the port of Brownsville the third largest importer and exporter of steel in the country.

But just as there is a historical aspect to the coming here of the shipbreakers, there is also a historical explanation for the shipment of scrap metal to Japan in 1937. It was to feed the Japanese war machine in its invasion of China, and later, Indochina.

During the early 1930s Japan was in an imperialist thrust and exerted its influence and invaded mainland China. Lacking iron ore deposits or access to other basic materials such as oil, it invaded its neighbors across the sea and eventually made its way to Manchuria and China.

Later, in July 1937, Chinese and Japanese troops exchanged fire in the vicinity of the Marco Polo (or Lugou) Bridge, a crucial access-route to Beijing.

Those actions led to protests in the Chinese communities in the United States and as early as March 1939 a picket was organized first in Astoria and Portland, Oregon to protest the sale of scrap iron and steel to Japan, where it was recycled into war material. This spread to other Pacific ports like San Francisco, with its large Chinese population.

 At the time of the protest, the Japanese government was waging an undeclared war against China. In 1939 approximately 2,000,000 tons of scrap metal were exported from the United States to Japan. The shipment from the port of Brownsville was a part of that Japanese effort to acquire was materiel.

 In July of 1940, Congress gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the authorization to subject defense industry exports to a licensing program that would, in effect, create an embargo of those goods to Japan. 

 Shortly after Japan invaded Indo-China (now Vietnam) in September of 1940, President Roosevelt used his new authority to impose a de facto embargo on scrap iron and steel to Japan. The embargo went into effect on October 16, 1940, and Japan turned toward Central and South America to support their continued needs for scrap metals.