Militarism: a way of life

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Michael Fitzgerald

It's tempting to believe that a change in which political party is in power could bring about a major change in U.S. foreign policy. But it isn't really so. The problem isn't in the White House or Congress; it's structural, built into our economy. The fact is, there are just too many people in the United States who are dependent on war for their livelihoods. I was once one of them: my father helped kill children in Vietnam in order to feed his own kids.

Being from working-class Boston, Massachusetts, my father was a registered Democrat. And Democrats can be just as hawkish--often more so--than Republicans. My father wanted to nuke Vietnam.

To be considered "electable" Democrats have to appease the large number of voters who depend on war for a living. Some of the most pro-war presidents have been Democrats. Woodrow Wilson presided over wholesale imprisonment of citizens who opposed U.S. entry into a war that he had solemnly promised to keep Americans out of. Harry S. Truman made the decision--many say unnecessary--to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. John F. Kennedy essentially won the 1960 election because he "out hawked" Richard Nixon. And Lyndon B. Johnson--who beat Barry Goldwater by labeling him a "warmonger"--turned out to be hawkish himself.

Or take Dwight D. Eisenhower: he was a career military man, not to mention the supreme allied commander of the European theater during World War II. You would expect him to be in favor of handouts to the military. Yet he made several valiant attempts to rein in bloated military budgets. For an army commander and a Republican he had said some pretty remarkable things. He opposed Truman's dropping "the big one" on Japan. In his 1961 farewell speech he warned of what he termed the military-industrial complex, adding, "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power [by this unseen force] exists and will persist." Who would know better than the outgoing president and former five-star general about the dangers of an "iron triangle" of defense contractors, politicians, and the military?

I WAS A CHILD living in Boston the day Eisenhower turned the presidency over to Kennedy. There was a grand, triumphant celebration in the city because Kennedy was a native son. My parents, who shared his middle name, were particularly thrilled.

My mother and father were both born in Boston during the Great Depression. Official unemployment hit 25 percent in 1933, the year my mother was born. My lather was from an Irish-American family of six children, all boys. There is no way to adequately express the punishment poverty laid upon his family. During the worst years of the Depression the younger boys, including my father, were placed in an orphanage because my grandparents simply couldn't support them. After a time things improved for my grandfather and the younger boys were retrieved; the older ones had already joined the military to escape the grinding poverty.

The sting of the Depression would affect my parents all their lives. My father parroted the conventional wisdom that World War II was "the only thing that could have gotten the country out of the Depression." The war turned out to be the ultimate jobs program. The results were swell: not only did it get the U.S. economy revved up, it got all the uneducated, unemployed, young men off the streets, put them to work (as cannon fodder), and tamed labor unrest all at the same time.

With the war's denouement at hand, U.S. industrialists feared the return of the Depression. In 1944 Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric and vice-chair of the War Production Board, told the Army Ordnance Association the answer to economic instability was "a permanent war economy." If anyone ever needed proof that imperialism and war are the end results of capitalism run amok, Wilson's speech would be exhibit A.

Soon Wilson and his cronies got their wish. In 1946 George F. Kennan, American charge d'affairs to Moscow, cabled a telegram to President Truman painting the Soviet Union as evil incarnate. The telegram was published a year later in Foreign Affairs and the article helped stir elite opinion against our former allies, the Soviets. Less than a year later Congress passed the National Security Act, the bill that turned Franklin D. Roosevelt's welfare state into Truman's warfare state.

That same year my father joined the Navy at age seventeen and was assigned to a squadron that included his eldest brother. My father, too, became a career military man, retiring as a chief petty officer after twenty-nine years. Then he worked another ten years for the Navy as a civilian.

I AM A BENEFICIARY of Charles Wilson's vision of a permanent war economy. My first eight years were spent in "the projects" while my father was away on sea duty most of the time. The neighborhood was dangerous and my mother was anxious to get herself and her four kids out. We finally got transferred to sunny California where, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, the government put a roof over our heads, food on our table, and a car in our garage.