For Might and Right

Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy

Michael Brenes

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781625345226, 9781625345219
• eBook ISBN: 9781613767726
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

How did the global Cold War influence American politics at home? For Might and Right traces the story of how Cold War defense spending remade participatory politics, producing a powerful and dynamic political coalition that reached across party lines. This "Cold War coalition" favored massive defense spending over social welfare programs, bringing together a diverse array of actors from across the nation, including defense workers, community boosters, military contractors, current and retired members of the armed services, activists, and politicians. Faced with neoliberal austerity and uncertainty surrounding America's foreign policy after the 1960s, increased military spending became a bipartisan solution to create jobs and stimulate economic growth, even in the absence of national security threats.

Using a rich array of archival sources, Michael Brenes draws important connections between economic inequality and American militarism that enhance our understanding of the Cold War's continued impact on American democracy and the resilience of the military-industrial complex, up to the age of Donald Trump.

Chapter One

Where the Global Meets the Parochial

Few defense employees in the 1950s foresaw the fate that befell the industry in the 1990s. In 1949, President John Jay Hopkins said that Electric Boat was “in the strongest financial position in its history,” as the Connecticut defense contractor reported “the largest backlog of unfilled orders” from government business—both domestic and international—and expected a “level of production high in contrast to that experienced by the company prior to the year 1941.” Three years later, in April 1952, Hopkins’s predictions came true: the company’s procurement backlog more than tripled, and the company had record profits—$3,872,203 in 1951 dollars. Hopkins also envisioned future gains from Cold War technology as the company was poised to bring an influx of jobs to southwestern Connecticut from “applications of atomic energy and nuclear fission.” Sure enough, three months later, the secretary of the navy, Dan Kimball, announced that the hull for an atomic power submarine would be built by Electric Boat because the defense contractor had “the design talent and nearly all the facilities necessary to begin work on the carrier immediately.”1

Kimball was not alone in this assessment. Individuals across the country, not just in Connecticut, thought the defense economy would be a reliable source of jobs throughout the 1950s. Indeed, on October 9, 1951, in the depths of the Korean War, the head of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Walter Reuther, wrote to President Harry S. Truman urging him to ensure federal assistance to workers affected by the transition to a wartime economy because there were plenty of jobs to be created from war. In December 1950, Truman launched the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) to handle the war at home by allocating defense contracts to businesses, hiring manpower, and streamlining production of necessary equipment. Reuther claimed that the rapid shift to defense urged by ODM had left civilian workers unemployed. Reuther, a man of the political Left who cut his teeth in socialist circles in the 1930s before helping found the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in the 1940s, wrote that the “working people of America are prepared to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to defend freedom against the threat of communist tyranny.” But their sacrifice demanded remuneration, as “defense work must be integrated in civilian plants to assure that the unused productive capacity” is utilized to resolve postwar unemployment.2

Republicans too wanted the federal government to spend more funds on national defense to put Americans to work. Another figure from Michigan and the Midwest, Republican representative Gerald Ford, sought defense funds for his constituents in the months before the Korean War broke out. Ford urged the National Security Resources Board (NSRB)—the predecessor to the ODM—to declare Grand Haven, Michigan (located in his congressional district), “a critical area” in need of defense contracts in order to help “the labor market conditions” in the city. Like Reuther, Ford wanted the federal government to provide full employment through the defense economy—as it had done during World War II.3

When the Cold War confronted “everyday life” in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it reconfigured the public’s relationship to the federal state. Americans’ lives at home were irrevocably affected by the United States’ global assault on communism during these decades.4 As the comments by individuals as diverse as John Jay Hopkins, Walter Reuther and Gerald Ford make clear, the public consistently sought access to the financial and social benefits provided by the Cold War. Americans regularly turned to the Cold War state for jobs and financial security when economic recession threatened their interests. In the absence of a broader social safety net, Cold War defense spending delivered federal benefits without the stigma of social welfare. Defense spending during the Cold War provided stable employment and economic prosperity to many Americans, for military Keynesianism to deliver Americans from unemployment.5

The precedent for military spending as a means of social welfare—to further economic interests, not just the interests of national security—emerged during the New Deal. In addition to delivering unemployment insurance, social security benefits, strengthened labor laws, and price controls on commodities, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal relied on national security spending to put unemployed Americans to work. During FDR’s first two years in office, the Public Works Administration (PWA) funneled federal defense funds into shipbuilding outside industrial centers in the Midwest and Northeast, furthering the fortunes of companies like Electric Boat—which increased their payrolls by five hundred workers from 1934 to 1935. As early as 1934, FDR’s close advisor, Harold Ickes, remarked that the “Navy has more Public Works money tied up than anyone else.” From 1933 to 1935, the army and navy were allotted 45 percent of federal funds from PWA projects combined. “There isn’t enough money in the United States Treasury to satisfy the Navy,” Ickes would later comment. By July 1940, another New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), had spent over $500 million on defense projects that had broader nondefense outcomes. Even before American entry into World War II, road construction for “defense” constituted 36 percent of the WPA’s employment figures on highways and various roads, even though these programs were “not always visible to the public as defense work per se.”6 The WPA also worked directly on defense projects during the war. The WPA remade seventeen civilian airports in Florida for the purposes of accommodating the military, and between 1935 and 1943, the WPA built 480 airports and retooled 470 others for reasons of national security.7 As historian Jason Scott Smith has argued, the New Deal was ultimately a massive public works program designed to stimulate employment while building American infrastructure. Much of the funds for public works were justified under the umbrella of “defense,” even if they went toward programs geared more toward social welfare, such as housing and hospitals for military personnel. Indeed, the New Deal was an expansive “public works policy,” where the “big winner in such a policy was national defense.”8

World War II enhanced the role of the defense industry as an agent of economic progress, as military spending brought near full employment to Americans by 1945. During the first few months of the war, military expenditures grew from $1.8 billion to $6.3 billion, with the federal government spending $304 billion on defense over the course of the war. Whereas unemployment hovered near 17 percent in 1937, by 1939 it dropped to less than 10 percent. And by the end of the war, unemployment would be less than 5 percent, with defense spending growing to 46 percent of gross domestic product. This was accomplished almost entirely through wartime production. Agencies such as the Defense Plant Corporation (DPC) and the War Production Board were dedicated to ensuring necessary manpower was available for a wartime economy. Out of the $15 billion allocated to private investment by the federal government since 1945, the DPC was responsible for “nearly two-thirds.”9 And because the war brought jobs, rising wages, and recovery from the Great Depression, the war years also fetishized military Keynesianism among the war’s architects (many of them Democrats), making defense spending the default for the liberals who left the Roosevelt administration, according to historian James Sparrow, still yearning for the “dream of full employment . . . well into the postwar years.”10

Once World War II ended, global economic forces made the military economy permanent. Indeed, the Cold War policy of containment encouraged the production and free exchange of goods to prevent the spread of communism to America’s trading partners, along with an expansive military. As President Harry Truman acknowledged in a speech on American economic policy to the American Legion in 1949, “World prosperity is necessary to our own prosperity in the United States.” For the United States to achieve economic growth, it also must be spread to the world.11 Indeed, throughout the Cold War, U.S. economic policy sought to keep European and Japanese markets open to American commodities, and vice versa. A Pax Americana boosted the economic fortunes of America’s allies, as the defense economy fueled growth abroad to preserve the security of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Japanese steel was used in American weapons during the Korean War, while American requests for one thousand trucks a month during the war became “Toyota’s salvation.”12 As countries profited from the products made by the Cold War, the defense economy became a structure and cultural symbol of American capitalism—in both a domestic and international context—which contributed to the growth of the national security state.

Policy makers’ thoughts on America’s proper role in the world also ensured the expansion of the warfare state into the Cold War. In the immediate months following the surrender of the Japanese in the fall of 1945, the Truman administration—and members of Congress—extracted several lessons from the war’s experience. One of the enduring lessons of the war was that the United States must prevent the recurrence of a surprise attack like Pearl Harbor. American leaders vowed to never again let U.S. security be jeopardized by a foreign attack. As the United States prepared to confront the threat of the Soviet Union (and more broadly, communism), the metaphor of Pearl Harbor became even more profound. Concerns that the Soviet Union would be the next Third Reich also generated an anticommunist ideology at home, one that reinforced a political economy premised on American militarism and shaped global affairs and the coming of a great power conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.13

Members of the Cold War coalition sought to take advantage of these global changes in parochial terms. Wanting to keep the “American Dream” alive in their districts and states, local and national politicians subsidized the defense industry to serve their respective political agendas. Facing these parochial demands, Republicans and Democrats—across the political spectrum—rewrote the tax code to allow defense companies tax write-offs and lower marginal tax rates during the Cold War. Cheap land grants were given to the Pentagon by southern Democrats to establish air and naval bases, military hospitals, and other federal defense facilities in the South, citing the desire for more high-skilled jobs and industrial progress in the region. After the 1950s, concerns of a nuclear attack from the Soviets and access to federal funds convinced Cold War Democrats to finance the construction of missile silos in the South Dakota plains, leading the Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers to coerce farmers into selling their land to the federal government for the sake of nuclear deterrence.14

As elected officials fortified the military-industrial complex during the early Cold War, they increasingly relied on anticommunism to justify their support for military Keynesianism, for jobs provided by the defense industry. Anticommunism thus drastically shaped the Cold War coalition on a local and national level. Whereas the New Deal and World War II provided the basis for the warfare state, the Cold War made the military-industrial complex permanent. In areas where the defense economy dominated, Democrats and Republicans relied on Cold War ideology to keep federal defense spending flowing to their districts and states; defense and military workers then employed Cold War rhetoric to urge politicians to keep defense contractors alive in their communities. Business figures and military officials with connections to U.S. foreign and national security policy, as well as political activists and organizations, joined the fray, seeking more defense funds to further their ideological agendas. It was this strange mixture of economics and ideology—of individuals that transcended partisan lines—that formed a Cold War coalition sizeable enough to ensure continued government spending on defense.

But the Cold War coalition would not achieve its goals on equal terms. Coalition members located in the Northeast and Midwest saw their jobs relocated to the Sunbelt South, which became a major site for investment in aerospace and innovative Cold War technology. As a looming conflict with the Soviet Union demanded a massive military buildup of unprecedented proportions, inequality increased among areas where military spending contributed to the personal fortunes of workers. The inequality experienced because of this phenomenon allowed the defense economy to shape electoral politics in interesting ways—which shaped the ideological and economic positions of members in the Cold War coalition. The early years of the Cold War thus mobilized a diverse array of individuals behind the military-industrial complex, even as many of these individuals experienced fewer gains from defense spending.

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Democrats’ and Republicans’ decision to grow the warfare state to contain the Soviet Union made both major parties into vehicles of anticommunism—and proponents of the military-industrial complex—after 1945. Indeed, Americans’ overwhelming reliance on the national security state was not determined after World War II but was a product of Cold War politics. President Truman initially wanted defense reductions during his early years in office, not defense increases. The onset of peacetime demanded a reorganization of budgetary priorities for the president. The defense budget was important, but not as significant as expanding domestic programs for middle-class and working-class Americans. From 1946 to 1949, Truman struggled to consolidate his “Fair Deal” for Americans, which would have broadened the New Deal through a program of national health insurance, new social security benefits, and civil rights reforms. Truman also wanted to prevent rising inflation rates, and like Roosevelt, embraced the need for a balanced budget. Reducing defense spending would go a long way toward achieving these goals, Truman felt.

But Truman’s opponents in Congress stymied his domestic agenda and halted his Fair Deal. While Truman confronted some anti–Fair Dealers from his own party—such as fiscal traditionalists like Maryland senator Millard Tydings—attacks on Truman’s domestic program were more prominent on the Republican Right.15 When Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress following the 1946 midterm elections, they quickly targeted Truman’s Fair Deal programs. A Republican congressional majority shut down national health insurance and the more social democratic aspects of the Fair Deal that enfranchised labor unions and the working class, including full employment.16 A Republican majority made the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947 possible (over Truman’s veto), a bill that gutted unions by allowing right-to-work laws in states and abolishing the closed shop. As Americans contemplated the threat of a communist monolith abroad, Republicans used the moment to portray unions and left-wing constituencies as communist inspired. Republicans like Joseph Ball of Minnesota claimed that the political activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) comprised “a combination of many left-wing elements together with the Communists and their fellow travelers” and these leftists were affiliated with the Truman administration.17

This political culture of anticommunism gave Republicans power and political advantage unseen since the 1920s. For much of the New Deal period and World War II, Republicans were an embattled party. After the 1936 elections, there were eighteen Republicans in the Senate. By 1943, that number grew to thirty, but Democrats had a two-thirds majority over the GOP. The early years of the Cold War, however, provided opportunities for Republicans to make the party popular again in the name of fighting communism. Republicans argued that the emerging threat of the Soviet Union—and the possible spread of communism to Eastern Europe—undermined the United States’ status and strength as a superpower after the war. American power was perpetually precarious and relied upon an attentive democracy, said Republicans. For example, Republican congressman from Michigan John B. Trevor spoke for many Republicans when he said that because Americans were not sufficiently mindful of the communist threat, “apathy and timidity are stifling patriotic action, so—Communism marches on!”18

Republicans thus felt it was their duty to educate the public on just how palpable and urgent the threat of communism was to the American way of life—while using institutions of federal power to silence political opponents. During the Red and Lavender Scares, Republican anticommunists broadened the national security bureaucracy of the federal government to pursue suspected enemies of the state without much concrete evidence. Working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, Republicans passed or supported laws that required loyalty oaths for federal employees, denied security clearances for suspected communists working in defense plants, and withdrew the passports of Cold War dissidents and civil rights activists like the African American singer Paul Robeson. And then there were Republicans like the senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who infamously exploited a long history of anticommunism in the United States to acquire electoral popularity. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy used his post as chairman of the Senate Investigating Committee to ferret alleged communists out of government, claiming that he had a list of documented communists employed by the State Department, one that soon grew to encompass other federal employees. Indeed, McCarthy’s name became synonymous with the Red Scare because of his skill in labeling all members of the Left as co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index