2 Fasten, 2 Furious: Oh, Snap

On the scale of things you fasten, odds are that snaps are a bit lower on the list than they once might have been. Once used on clothing more generally, they have gradually turned from a primary closing tool into one of many.

The snap was ultimately overshadowed by the zipper, which takes a more prominent role in our clothing routine, but it’s actually just as important, because it added a degree of efficiency to our clothing that wasn’t there previously. Sure, maybe it’s the part of your coat that you don’t actually fasten, because your zipper already has it covered. But it’s still an essential part of our collective fastening journey.

In case you’re not aware, this is the kind of fastener we’re talking about. ASMR it up.

Throughout the 1880s, the modern spring-loaded snap fastener came into being, with a variety of inventors attempting to solidify the form. As researcher Steve Saunders wrote in a PDF essay for the blog Tales From the Supply Depot, at least a dozen distinct inventors have patent filings that suggest they contributed to the invention of the object. The earliest, dating to 1876, was developed by a U.S. inventor named William Orr, which Saunders describes as “Almost; but not quite!” Saunders credits Albert G. Mead with inventing the first one, dating to 1880.

But the one that Wikipedia credits as first was developed just a few years later by Heribert Bauer, a German national. While Bauer may not have been the first to the invention, metal snaps quickly became associated with Germany and nearby Austria, and were manufactured at scale there throughout the early part of the 20th century.

This eventually became a problem.

The reason the U.S. market started making its own snap fasteners feels extremely relevant to the current debate about tariffs

Recently, a lot of hay has been made about tariffs and how enforcing them would bring destruction to the U.S. economy by essentially cutting off access to manufacturing resources we don’t currently have at home.

There is a genuine fear that, all of a sudden, something might happen, and we’re no longer able to supply, for example, new computers with RAM, or semiconductors, because we aren’t making those things in the United States anymore. Or, perhaps, it’s something we’ve never actually made here, that we suddenly need to build here. What happens?

Turns out, this is not a theoretical situation, and something just like this happened with snap fasteners during the first World War. The snap fastener, despite being developed by a seemingly a billion different inventors, had largely entered the American market through Central Europe. And while there was a time that tariffs made this use cost-prohibitive, those tariffs were eventually cut from 50% to just 15%, causing great harm to American manufacturers, whose complaints ended up getting ignored.

But the global state of affairs decided to intervene: In 1914, Central Europe became the flash point for World War I, and given that most of them were made in Germany and Austria, that meant that there was suddenly a shortage of snaps. Ads in the Dry Goods Reporter that year even tried to market against the shortage:

You don’t have to have snap-fasteners to fill the snap-fastener demand. The shortage of imported snaps if just beginning to be serious. Fortunately the new smaller sizes of Wilson Dresshooks are now perfected and being delivered. They are already outselling our larger sizes four to one.

All of a sudden, despite the cut in tariffs, there was a huge demand for American-made snap fasteners, and the U.S. market responded by … effectively launching a new industry. While there were a handful of snaps-makers prior to the war, they were dwarfed by the dozens of new companies that entered the market. These companies, with names such as the American Fastener Company, even attempted to launch an association in 1916 called the National Snap Fastener Manufacturers’ Association.

Of course, the World War eventually ended, and the whole conflict about the tariffs had never been fully resolved—which meant German and Austrian snap-fastener makers were now able to usurp the Americans once again, if they wanted. In a July 1919 hearing with the House Committee of Ways and Means, American Snap Fastener Company president Simon Nager stated that, before the war, there were just two minor manufacturers of snaps, a number that ballooned to between 30 and 40 by the time Nager spoke to the committee. (The association apparently did not last, however. During the hearing, Nager denied that the manufacturers had an industry association.)

Obviously snap fasteners seem like a very specific thing to put in front of Congress, but Nager wanted to make clear that the snap fastener industry was worth protecting. Nager attempted to win over the committee by highlighting the fact that the sudden increase in snap fastener manufacturing had a halo effect on the chemical manufacturers and finishing firms.

“All of this product is made in the United States by American manufacturers, and none of it was made when the product was being brought in from Germany,” he said.

Despite the push for protection from tariffs, it wasn’t enough to save the American Snap Fastener Company, which went bankrupt in 1922. However, evidence is strong that the U.S. had gained an increasingly protectionist vibe during this period, with the passage of the Emergency Tariff of 1921, which was targeted at farmers, just one example.

In 1922, the Fordney–McCumber Tariff, which increased tariffs once again, included snaps as one of the many product categories covered under the law. That tariff increase, combined with 1930’s Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which further upped the ante, ultimately reflected the protectionist attitudes of the time. And the snap fastener was occasionally pointed at as a reason we needed aggressive tariffs.

“We all know how the American snap fastener was introduced to the American market,” one article from the period, collected in the pro-tariff journal The Protectionist, stated. “None of us is anxious to go through the same experience again—in any branch of the notion business.”

Of course, tariffs don’t go one way—European countries responded to the tariffs in kind, and Smoot-Hawley, which further doubled down on protectionist tariffs, is now seen as one of the contributing factors to the Great Depression.

I bet you thought we were talking about snap fasteners over here.