There Comes a Time for Boycotts
As history proves, not all protests are created equal
On Sunday, September 19, 1880, in the town of Ennis, County Clare, the Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell addressed tens of thousands of his countrymen. The son of a wealthy Anglo-Irish father and a Scots-American mother—the daughter of American naval hero Charles “Old Ironsides” Stewart—Parnell had been elected to Parliament in 1875, and promptly threw his body upon Prime Minister Disraeli’s gears of government. But in the fall of 1880, he was just 33 years old, not yet the the tragic hero whom Joyce and Yeats would commemorate in verse. He was a young man with a purpose—Irish independence—and a plan to achieve it.
“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the road-side when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him in the shop, you must shun him in the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship,” Parnell told the crowd. “By leaving him severely alone, but putting him into a moral convent, by isolating him from the rest of his countrymen as if he were a leper of old, you much show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”
Parnell needed was a suitable target, and just a few days later one presented itself. So, on September 22, a crowd of local laborers descended on a farm belonging to Lord Erne, an absentee aristocrat. Like many of Ireland’s vast estates, this one was managed by an English land agent, who soon found himself thoroughly ostracized by the community: his employees refused to work his fields, the blacksmith refused to fix his tools, the post office refused to deliver his mail. By October 14, when he wrote a letter to the conservative Times of London, the land agent was at his wit’s end:
“I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country. I say nothing about the danger to my own life, which is apparent to anybody who knows the country.”
— Charles C. Boycott
You hear Boycott’s name a lot these days, and you’ll only hear it more as we enter Pride month. The Christian-nationalist right has already declared war against any brand which displays even the shallowest solidarity with the LGBTQIA movement, whether through rainbow-hued products, working with queer activists, or issuing wan public statements of support. Bud Light has already been hit after partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a brief Instagram promotion—testament to right-wing transphobia so pervasive it extends to any manifestation of trans existence in public life, including taking a sip of beer on camera. Last week, Target buckled, and the anti-Pride forces have now set their sights on the North Face, Levis, Chick-fil-A, Walmart, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the NFL, to name a few. On the other end of the political spectrum, the NAACP has called for a national boycott of Florida in protest of Ron DeSantis’s sun-dried fascism. Boycotts tend to spawn counter-boycotts, an ouroboros of recrimination—which is not to say that utilizing the same tactics is tantamount to moral equivalency.
The history of passive resistance, and even the boycott, goes back far further than late nineteenth century Ireland. According to most authorities, the first instance of collective protest was the secessio plebis of 495 BC, when Rome's plebeian underclass refused to work or fight for the city until their demands were met by the ruling elite. When the nascent republic came under attack, the plebs gained the upper hand, and won the concessions that would help transform a petty kingdom into an empire.Fast forward a couple of millennia, and we get a bit closer to Parnell’s definition of the boycott, a form of total social ostracism.
In 2023, the term “Tea Party” conjures visions of corny goons hanging Obama in effigy while wearing tricorn hats. But the O.G. Tea Partiers (Boston edition) were among the first activists to withhold their purchasing power—in this case by rejecting tea from the East India Company—in order to compel change. More recently, the first half of the twentieth century saw China boycott American goods in response to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jews boycott German goods in response to Hitler’s rise—and then Nazis counter-boycott Jewish goods (before murdering all the Jews they could get their hands on). The Gandhi-led boycott of British salt was critical step in the march to Indian independence. And Martin Luther King, Jr.—inspired by Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent confrontation—made boycotts the chief tactic in his drive for civil rights in the United States.
Like any given weapon, the boycott is prone to abuse in the wrong hands: some campaigns are grounded in moral righteousness, while others are founded on bigotry. The Ku Klux Klan boycotted Jewish, Black and Catholic businesses during its late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century iterations, principally organized by Klanswomen. In the fifties, sixties and seventies, white families boycotted public schools en masse, as did white residents of South Boston and other cities when the federal government instituted busing campaigns to rectify a de facto segregated public school system. (The results were a proliferation of both explicitly racist parochial schools across the South, and a severely undereducated generation of both white and Black students.)
The heirs of these contemptibles—the contemporary culture-war ideologues behind the war on gay life in America—are a real dream team of jackbooted dipshits. Their avowed goal is to eradicate public queer existence, and their pronouncements unabashedly reflect that desire. Consider the recent statements of right-wing ringleaders: Matt Walsh: “The goal is to make ‘Pride’ toxic for brands”; Michael Knowles: “the pride flag symbol, we need to make that toxic. We need to have companies think twice about it”; Charlie Kirk: “Pain is a teacher and the pain of crossing the line to perverting our children and grooming them, it’s going to be a lesson I hope corporate America watches because ordinary America is pushing back.”
In reality, what they’re calling for aren’t strictly “boycotts,” at least not the kind Charles Parnell envisioned—communities refusing to act en masse. As in nearly every aspect of public life in America, particularly when the far right is involved, the incipient or actual potential for violence hangs over the whole thing, an electro-charged cloud of threat. These are protests, true, but they sure as hell aren’t passive; there are no shortage of unhinged viral video clips of right-wingers rampaging through Target, battle-rapping with mannequins, muttering about Satan, and then harassing employees about it. When Target responded by moving some merchandise in Southern outlets from the front of the store to the back, it wasn’t because the company’s bottom line was taking a hit. It was the prospect of violence: “Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”
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There are numerous reasons for why a boycott succeeds or fails: the vulnerability of the target (or Target); the purchasing power or lack thereof of the boycotting population; and the narrative painted by the media. Bud Light—with its numerous competitors in the shitty beer market and its “traditional” costumers—caved to pressure. The North Face—with its roots in the counterculture and its progressive consumer base—doubled down.
“A lot of research in the past has shown that [boycotts] don’t necessarily affect their targets’ bottom lines that much,” wrote Brayden King of Northwestern’s Kellogg Institute in a 2009 study. “It’s not clear that boycotts affect consumer behavior very much. But those boycotts that get some level of media attention are relatively successful in terms of getting some sort of concession out of their targets.”
If there is one factor those calling for these Pride protests are ignoring, it’s this: they are vastly outnumbered. Faced with a left-right binary choice—catering to the one or kowtowing to the other—most companies can appreciate the fact that the most vocal right-wing bigots represent an ideological, and numerical, minority, one whose constituents have a mere fraction of the purchasing power of the opposed or merely indifferent majority. At the moment, Walsh, Knowles, Kirk, and company are making a lot of noise. But not all global behemoths are created equal, and queer life is more enduring than manufactured outrage, no matter how many viral videos bigotry spawns.
In 1955, when Black leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, determined to rise up against the city’s culture of oppression, they didn’t pick just any target, and they didn’t pick just any weapon. It was all phenomenally purposeful. The Montgomery Bus System was a highly visible, rolling billboard for Jim Crow, but its ridership was 75% African-American, and its economic fate rested in the hands of those customers. Rosa Parks, the chosen face of the boycott, was a committed activist and an upstanding member of the community. When she was arrested in December for refusing to give up her seat, local civil rights leader E.D. Nixon called up Martin Luther King, Jr. with the news: “We got it! We got our case!” The bus boycott didn’t end segregation, but it provided much-needed fuel for the ongoing struggle.
Similarly, when Charles Parnell and his Irish National Land League were casting about for a target to test their strategy of social excommunication, they found the perfect foil in Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a taciturn Englishman who had engendered little affection among his neighbors. Still, the first battles in the media war were won by Boycott, whose case was taken up by the right-wing loyalist cheerleaders in the English press. Money was raised to help support Boycott and his family, a team of 50 Ulstermen volunteered to bring in his harvest, and 1000 troops were deployed to defend them. He had become a cause celebré for the ruling class.
But like Parks and King eighty years later, Charles Parnell had lit a fuse. The boycott movement spread from estate to estate across the Irish countryside. A year after launching the campaign, Parnell would find himself behind bars, and the Land League outlawed. But he’d established himself as his homeland’s leading politician; just a few years later William Gladstone’s liberal government passed the long-sought Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881. Among his countrymen, Parnell was dubbed “the uncrowned king of Ireland.”
Alas, an illustrious career and eventful life were less than a decade later, when Parnell’s extra-marital love affair was revealed. By today’s standards, there was nothing especially tawdry about the relationship between Parnell and Kitty O’Shea—they were deeply in love, and had three children together, albeit out of wedlock. But in 1891, in a country that divided its allegiance between the Vatican and Victoria, adultery was too much to take. In Parnell’s frantic campaign to clear his name and salvage his career, he worked and worried himself to an early grave, dying of pneumonia at the the age of 46.
In the Irish imagination, Parnell’s premature death set the Independence movement back by decades. According to Irish writer Fintan O’Toole, this was to become the enduring theme of James Joyce: “the long-delayed hope of independence that was frustrated again with the downfall of Ireland’s leading politician, Charles Stewart Parnell.” Like Moses on Mount Nebo, or Martin Luther King on his own mountaintop, Parnell could see the promised land—Joyce’s “Pisgah Sight of Palestine”—but never got the chance to experience it himself. The name of his original target may be more familiar to readers today than his own, but for those fighting injustice, Parnell’s example endures. In the wrong hands, a boycott can be used to drive corporations to uphold fanatical bigotry; but when used with strategic precision, it can further a just cause with the power, as Parnell originally put it, of our “detestation” aimed at “moral lepers” and those who abet them.
Well done overview of boycotting! One that was left out was the grape boycott here in California, when the United Farm Workers were getting going. I remember going to grocery stores in the 1960s and seeing table grapes rotting and stinking up the produce section. The boycott was quite effective, so much so that it was decades before anyone in my family ever bought grapes again.
Tiny geography correction. Ennis is in County Clare. Boycott lived in Mayo. Sorry for being that guy. Also the Dunnes Stores workers in Ireland organising a boycott of apartheid South African products in the 1980s is worth a read.