Will They Bottle Up Our Scrap? Copper Exports Under Watch

Come close, for the wind carries a curious rumor from the Shanghai men. Their dispatch tells us the United States has drawn a fence around certain critical mineral scrap, and asks the question that pricks my old ears like a struck cent: could copper scrap be next?

Now I have spent a life with the red metal. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents and better, sent them ringing across every saloon and eating-house in New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them — caged bear, tooth-pulling chair, and all. I learned then a truth the statesmen are only now discovering: copper is not idle metal. It moves. Hand to hand, still to bottle, mine to motor, it is the busiest citizen in the republic.

Which is why talk of penning it behind an export law makes a man sit up. Understand what scrap truly is — it is copper resurrected. A gutter torn from a green roof, a coil pulled from a dead motor, a length of #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.49 the pound this very morning, with the market down a whisker, three parts in a thousand. That old wire may be reborn as the veins of a data center, the windings of an electric carriage, the water line beneath your kitchen — or, dearest to my heart, as the gleaming belly of a whiskey still.

For I will not let a dispatch pass without honoring copper's holiest office. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's worm coiled in the creek — all are copper, and for good reason. Copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would turn a fine spirit into poison. A stainless vessel is a cold clerk; it counts the vapor and lets it pass. Copper is the confessor — it takes the sin out. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the hollows of Appalachia, every clean dram of whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its sweetness to the red metal. Restrict the scrap and you tax the still, the wire, and the roof alike.

My counsel, given free: I do not fear a fence around American copper so much as I respect it. A nation that keeps its scrap keeps its power to conduct, to plumb, and — glory of glories — to distill. If the lawmakers hoard the red metal at home, let them at least return it to the coppersmiths and the distillers who know its worth. Hold your grades honest, watch the East for tremors, and remember: copper that stays in the republic is copper that comes back to life.

Keep your worm bright and your ledgers brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins