WEBVTT NOTE War, Politics, and Money: Some Economic Aspects of America’s Crusades Since 1900 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.320 War politics and money, some aspects of America's crusade since 1900. 2 00:00:07.320 --> 00:00:14.800 War economics, war parties and state elites are at the heart of the revisionist historical 3 00:00:14.800 --> 00:00:18.920 tradition that's very much intertwined with the Austrian School of Economics. 4 00:00:18.920 --> 00:00:25.080 And today I will first make some brief comments on the nature of war parties and war making 5 00:00:25.080 --> 00:00:29.540 elites in the United States over the last century or so. 6 00:00:29.540 --> 00:00:35.200 Then I will introduce a kind of group portrait of the United States Secretaries of War and 7 00:00:35.200 --> 00:00:41.900 Defense since McKinley as a way of making a concrete related point. 8 00:00:41.900 --> 00:00:47.820 We can, probably all of us in this room, list any number of home front processes that occur 9 00:00:47.820 --> 00:00:50.020 in modern wars. 10 00:00:50.020 --> 00:00:54.180 Even a short and incomplete list will suffice for my argument today since I just want to 11 00:00:54.180 --> 00:00:58.060 make some connections, but you could do this at home. 12 00:00:58.060 --> 00:00:59.060 Don't worry kids. 13 00:00:59.060 --> 00:01:07.540 is a safe thing to do. So play with your list of what happens in modern wars. I'm saying, 14 00:01:07.540 --> 00:01:16.820 number one, accelerated government intervention in society and the economy, accelerated expropriation 15 00:01:16.820 --> 00:01:26.180 and legal plunder, of course, confiscation, inflation, etc. My third point would be destruction 16 00:01:26.180 --> 00:01:29.140 Reconstruction and Reconstruction, and I'm borrowing that phrase from Richard Taylor's 17 00:01:29.140 --> 00:01:35.780 great memoir of the Civil War and after, but by this I mean the process whereby war is 18 00:01:35.780 --> 00:01:42.980 waged in ways which seem to necessitate certain kinds of specific reconstruction by specific 19 00:01:42.980 --> 00:01:50.660 companies after the war. Fourth, the simultaneous centralization of power and the minimization 20 00:01:50.660 --> 00:01:58.400 of Individual Liberties and Individual Lives. Finally, the special prominence of a group 21 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:04.700 of welfare, warfare decision-makers and collectivist managers of a certain type. Some Austrian commentators 22 00:02:04.700 --> 00:02:11.020 have called them the state elite. Paul Gottfried has referred to them as denizens of the managerial 23 00:02:11.020 --> 00:02:17.520 state. Rothbard referred to this elite as the coercive elite. And this includes the intellectual 24 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:21.800 in Business Elites and the Military Elites who push for war and warlike situations and 25 00:02:21.800 --> 00:02:23.440 war preparation. 26 00:02:23.440 --> 00:02:29.120 Though we could, as I say, each of us go on and on, we'll stop there. 27 00:02:29.120 --> 00:02:37.600 But it's important to add to this idea of what happens in a war, that since McKinley, 28 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:42.320 American military aggression has gone forth in the name of democracy, as we've seen in 29 00:02:42.320 --> 00:02:43.960 so many ways here today. 30 00:02:43.960 --> 00:02:48.680 The clearest-cut case was Wilson's call to make the world safe for democracy, but in 31 00:02:48.680 --> 00:02:54.160 one way or another, this vision of American democracy leading us to righteous wars has 32 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:00.060 come to seem almost a call and response trope. And the answer to the call of making the world 33 00:03:00.060 --> 00:03:05.560 safe is, of course, they hate us because of our freedom. 34 00:03:05.560 --> 00:03:12.840 Now this reflex is not natural. In other words, it's not natural for the public to say what 35 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:18.220 What we all hear them say on a daily basis. It has to be learned, and as they say, this 36 00:03:18.220 --> 00:03:23.860 lesson has to be relearned every generation. Academia and the news media help spread the 37 00:03:23.860 --> 00:03:29.580 message that they hate us for our freedom, etc., etc. But so do the political parties 38 00:03:29.580 --> 00:03:35.780 as extensions of this state elite. Indeed, it's important here to think about the role 39 00:03:35.780 --> 00:03:41.540 of war parties in a democratic order. In modern times, of course, war and war preparation 40 00:03:41.540 --> 00:03:49.300 and results not from the desires of king and cabinet, but from a huge array of interests. 41 00:03:49.300 --> 00:03:56.300 The state elite is a whole machinery of individuals. Now we're tempted to call this machinery faceless, 42 00:03:56.300 --> 00:04:04.180 but they do indeed have faces. The purveyors of war do indeed engage in human action. Likewise, 43 00:04:04.180 --> 00:04:11.180 it's clear that this coercive elite is made up of a range of constituent elites and branches. 44 00:04:11.180 --> 00:04:21.180 Rothbard's famous essay, War as Fulfillment, is instructive not just as a lesson in the history of World War I, but also as a historical paradigm. 45 00:04:21.180 --> 00:04:27.180 The two great American parties play a vital role in this whole indoctrination process. 46 00:04:27.180 --> 00:04:31.180 Aggression has been largely bipartisan since McKinley. 47 00:04:31.180 --> 00:04:39.020 George W. Bush revels in being called a war president, but since McKinley, we've scarcely 48 00:04:39.020 --> 00:04:42.180 had a president who was not a war president. 49 00:04:42.180 --> 00:04:46.820 The fable told on the evening news is that the Republicans are hawks and the Democrats 50 00:04:46.820 --> 00:04:47.820 doves. 51 00:04:47.820 --> 00:04:53.900 Certainly, leading Republicans self-identify as hawks and often try to outstrip each other 52 00:04:53.900 --> 00:04:56.440 in bellicose statements. 53 00:04:56.440 --> 00:05:02.520 Even some libertarians and paleocons continue to think of the GOP, perhaps because of Coolidge 54 00:05:02.520 --> 00:05:09.520 or Robert Taft. They think of it as not a party of aggression, that somehow this is 55 00:05:10.320 --> 00:05:16.680 the extraordinary case that it's the aggressive party. Yet the Robert Tafts and the Ron Pauls 56 00:05:16.680 --> 00:05:19.960 are the aberrations, not the other way around. 57 00:05:19.960 --> 00:05:26.260 Again, I'm talking about bipartisan bellicosity here. George McGovern was just as much an 58 00:05:26.260 --> 00:05:31.540 and Oddball for the Democrats as Ron Paul was for the Machine Republicans. 59 00:05:31.540 --> 00:05:37.180 Now in working on this whole set of themes, I began thinking about Secretaries of Defense 60 00:05:37.180 --> 00:05:41.480 and their role in this warfare, welfare elite. 61 00:05:41.480 --> 00:05:47.000 And I decided to turn to the historian's tool of group biographical study. 62 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:49.400 We call that prosopography. 63 00:05:49.400 --> 00:05:54.960 And so I will now turn to a short survey, which I made, of the Secretaries of War and 64 00:05:54.960 --> 00:05:57.820 and Defense since McKinley. 65 00:05:57.820 --> 00:06:04.240 It is an informal and fairly superficial prosopography or group biography of these Secretaries of 66 00:06:04.240 --> 00:06:05.320 War and Defense. 67 00:06:05.320 --> 00:06:09.840 As an aside, the title of the office changed from Secretary of War to Secretary of Defense 68 00:06:09.840 --> 00:06:19.420 in 1947 with a big reorganization of the establishment, and so they're both pre-1947 Secretary of 69 00:06:19.420 --> 00:06:20.420 War. 70 00:06:20.420 --> 00:06:23.140 I chose to begin with McKinley's Secretary of War 71 00:06:23.140 --> 00:06:26.940 since McKinley, in essence, formalized the imperial pattern 72 00:06:26.940 --> 00:06:30.940 explored only intermittently by earlier presidents. 73 00:06:31.820 --> 00:06:33.540 From the time of McKinley, though, 74 00:06:33.540 --> 00:06:36.180 we get all things in place, 75 00:06:36.180 --> 00:06:39.820 all the pieces come into place for modernity. 76 00:06:39.820 --> 00:06:43.000 Collectivism, the inflationary regime, 77 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:47.360 this destruction-reconstruction pattern, 78 00:06:47.360 --> 00:06:49.920 the warfare, welfare state, and all of it. 79 00:06:50.420 --> 00:06:59.420 My survey does not go as far as archival research, but even on the surface, the secretarial biographies are informative. 80 00:06:59.420 --> 00:07:09.420 Of 41 secretary ships of war or defense since McKinley, we're looking at 39 individuals since two served twice under two separate presidents. 81 00:07:09.420 --> 00:07:13.420 These 39 secretaries came from 19 states only. 82 00:07:13.420 --> 00:07:20.620 The overwhelming majority were from the Atlantic seaboard, and indeed, and I think strangely, 83 00:07:20.620 --> 00:07:27.060 41% of these secretaries of defense and war came from just three states, New York, Pennsylvania, 84 00:07:27.060 --> 00:07:30.620 and Ohio, with Pennsylvania having the most. 85 00:07:30.620 --> 00:07:36.700 Casting our net just a very little bit wider geographically, we get two-thirds of all the 86 00:07:36.700 --> 00:07:41.140 secretaries in a kind of triangle reaching, if you imagine it, stretching from New York 87 00:07:41.140 --> 00:07:45.500 to Lake Erie, down to about Baltimore and back up. 88 00:07:45.500 --> 00:07:51.300 You really have two-thirds of all the Secretaries of War and Defense since 1900, which I think 89 00:07:51.300 --> 00:07:54.820 is quite remarkable. 90 00:07:54.820 --> 00:08:02.380 Of the group, 52% attended Ivy League institutions, some of them only the professional schools. 91 00:08:02.380 --> 00:08:06.860 Of the Ivy Leaguers, 11 were Republicans, 10 Democrats. 92 00:08:06.860 --> 00:08:12.860 Significantly, I think, in spite of the Ivy League connections, most of the secretaries 93 00:08:12.860 --> 00:08:18.060 came from middle class and even lower middle class backgrounds. Of course, not all. Robert 94 00:08:18.060 --> 00:08:26.540 Lovett, for example, a Truman secretary of war was a scion of Pacific Union money and 95 00:08:26.540 --> 00:08:31.300 hence he was related to a couple of banking empires. Elliot Richardson, Nixon's secretary 96 00:08:31.300 --> 00:08:37.660 of Defense was from a blue-blooded family of Boston Brahmins, and there were others, 97 00:08:37.660 --> 00:08:43.740 but on the whole, the war and defense secretaries have been the same kind of men, and on the 98 00:08:43.740 --> 00:08:49.420 whole, the type is common to both parties. 99 00:08:49.420 --> 00:08:57.860 Well for the talk today, then I created an ideal type war defense secretary since McKinley. 100 00:08:57.860 --> 00:09:03.440 So I'll give you this model secretary. It's a fiction, but even the most extreme outliers 101 00:09:03.440 --> 00:09:09.460 among the 39 really do not stray too far from the following portrait. Our secretary of defense, 102 00:09:09.460 --> 00:09:16.400 our ideal secretary, is an individual from, let's say, Altoona, Pennsylvania. Many small 103 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:21.900 towns in here, actually, and small cities. He does not come from wealth or old money, 104 00:09:21.900 --> 00:09:26.940 but from a sturdy middle-class background, one which would enable a bright boy to make 105 00:09:26.940 --> 00:09:34.100 and make it by dent of hard work and brains to an Ivy League education, most likely Yale. 106 00:09:34.100 --> 00:09:38.500 He writes or edits one of the college publications. 107 00:09:38.500 --> 00:09:42.780 Since our man is at Yale and he's clever and articulate, he is sought out by a secret 108 00:09:42.780 --> 00:09:48.900 society and he gets into Skull and Bones, rubbing shoulders there with representatives 109 00:09:48.900 --> 00:09:51.020 of the elite families and fortunes. 110 00:09:51.020 --> 00:09:55.180 The most frequent club of our guys is Skull and Bones. 111 00:09:55.180 --> 00:09:59.700 This is all reflected in these numbers. 112 00:10:00.580 --> 00:10:02.180 If there is a war after college, 113 00:10:02.180 --> 00:10:04.940 our men will serve a short stint in the military. 114 00:10:04.940 --> 00:10:08.620 Our future secretary will then study law at Harvard, 115 00:10:09.500 --> 00:10:11.900 work for a law firm or an investment bank, 116 00:10:11.900 --> 00:10:15.060 and then make his way into state or national politics. 117 00:10:15.060 --> 00:10:17.620 He'll serve in a number of legislative 118 00:10:17.620 --> 00:10:19.540 and executive positions. 119 00:10:19.540 --> 00:10:30.540 Our prosopographical man would most definitely be in the Council on Foreign Relations if it's after 1919. 120 00:10:30.540 --> 00:10:42.540 After serving for three or four years as Secretary of War or Defense, our man will go back to business, which in this context almost certainly means banking. 121 00:10:42.540 --> 00:10:54.540 He would also maintain extensive board memberships, consultative positions and other connections to various industries, especially and almost certainly the arms industry. 122 00:10:54.540 --> 00:11:04.540 And he would sit on various task force committees within the worlds of government and the great tax-free foundations and think tanks, such as the Ford Foundation or the Wren Corporation. 123 00:11:04.540 --> 00:11:20.540 And of course, whether actually in business or not, our average ideal secretary would have ties to, certainly have ties to one of the investment banking firms, Lehman Brothers, Morgan, Jacob Schiff, Goldman Sachs, et cetera, et cetera. 124 00:11:20.540 --> 00:11:26.460 Finally, our prosopographically, that's the longest word in my presentation, at least 125 00:11:26.460 --> 00:11:31.460 it's got the most syllables, prosopographically perfect man would be personally acquainted 126 00:11:31.460 --> 00:11:36.660 with the several contemporary secretaries of defense or war before or after his service. 127 00:11:36.660 --> 00:11:42.380 In other words, he would know his predecessors and successors personally from a long time 128 00:11:42.380 --> 00:11:44.540 back. 129 00:11:44.540 --> 00:11:49.660 Now let me say there's plenty of incidental variation in the pool. 130 00:11:49.660 --> 00:11:53.980 But the variations are actually superficially quite interesting. 131 00:11:53.980 --> 00:11:58.620 One secretary of war, for example, had two descendants, a grandson and granddaughter who 132 00:11:58.620 --> 00:12:01.680 were nominated for the Academy Awards. 133 00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:06.340 That was George Dern, one of FDR secretaries. 134 00:12:06.340 --> 00:12:13.600 One secretary of defense who served twice in between his service joined Big Pharma and 135 00:12:13.600 --> 00:12:20.040 and successfully gained the FDA approval of Aspartame, that was Rumsfeld. 136 00:12:20.040 --> 00:12:27.600 One secretary of war was the man who had previously established the Davis Cup in tennis, that 137 00:12:27.600 --> 00:12:32.840 was Davis, Coolidge under Coolidge, Dwight Davis. 138 00:12:32.840 --> 00:12:41.080 Two secretaries had previously been college roommates, that was Rumsfeld and Carlucci. 139 00:12:41.080 --> 00:12:49.440 And one of Roosevelt's war secretaries was a strict non-interventionist. How about that? 140 00:12:49.440 --> 00:12:54.840 This was Harry Woodring. Now, not all these guys were college roommates, but they did 141 00:12:54.840 --> 00:12:59.920 belong to a pretty small class, a small Mandarin class where everybody knew each other, everybody 142 00:12:59.920 --> 00:13:05.200 came up the same way, and everybody had the same background. Either before or after their 143 00:13:05.200 --> 00:13:13.320 Under cabinet service, most of these secretaries were connected with banking or law or both. 144 00:13:13.320 --> 00:13:19.240 Any secretary of war in modern times spends most of his time in supply and procurement 145 00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:24.120 and as a result of course business experience in particular makes sense and so several secretaries 146 00:13:24.120 --> 00:13:31.680 had previously been corporate CEOs like McNamara and coming from Ford and so forth. 147 00:13:31.680 --> 00:13:34.400 A few of the secretaries came from old money and privilege. 148 00:13:34.400 --> 00:13:37.880 They were the patricians, but only a few. 149 00:13:37.880 --> 00:13:41.160 They tended to be on the whole solidly middle class, 150 00:13:41.160 --> 00:13:43.680 not upper middle class at all. 151 00:13:43.680 --> 00:13:47.700 These were not the shadowy puppet masters of imagination, 152 00:13:47.700 --> 00:13:49.760 but rather the sons of insurance salesmen 153 00:13:49.760 --> 00:13:52.400 and school teachers whose ambition took them 154 00:13:52.400 --> 00:13:54.440 to positions of influence. 155 00:13:54.440 --> 00:13:58.640 Indeed, some exercised enormous influence on policy. 156 00:13:58.640 --> 00:14:02.960 think Stimson, McNamara, Rumsfeld, for example. 157 00:14:02.960 --> 00:14:05.800 Some much less, some disagreed with their president 158 00:14:05.800 --> 00:14:08.320 on fundamental policies, but all were there 159 00:14:08.320 --> 00:14:11.120 to do the bidding of the political class, 160 00:14:11.120 --> 00:14:13.620 to procure the materials for war, 161 00:14:13.620 --> 00:14:16.920 to procure them from the preferred sources, 162 00:14:16.920 --> 00:14:19.080 to shape American defense organizations 163 00:14:19.080 --> 00:14:21.980 so as to carry out the military plans 164 00:14:21.980 --> 00:14:23.880 of the president and his advisors, 165 00:14:23.880 --> 00:14:27.200 maybe even to ensure that the destruction inflicted 166 00:14:27.200 --> 00:14:54.200 These secretaries certainly provided one of the secured connections between politics and the upper-level decision-making layers of wise men, as the long-range planners have called themselves, the patricians and the planners and the elites. 167 00:14:54.200 --> 00:15:00.560 Hence, the secretaries have been high-level civil servants, but not really metternichs 168 00:15:00.560 --> 00:15:05.640 or richelues. There were no coachmen of Europe among them, so to speak, yet their function 169 00:15:05.640 --> 00:15:15.600 is really crucial to the warfare welfare state. Since we are looking specifically at the nature 170 00:15:15.600 --> 00:15:20.040 of the political parties as war parties, I must note a difference in style among our 171 00:15:20.040 --> 00:15:27.360 The Democratic Party has tended to choose a few more out-of-sync secretaries than the 172 00:15:27.360 --> 00:15:29.320 Republican Party. 173 00:15:29.320 --> 00:15:34.600 So for example, Roosevelt did have the misfortune of having chosen a strict non-interventionist 174 00:15:34.600 --> 00:15:38.800 for the position of war secretary, that was Harry Woodring, 1936. 175 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:44.720 Loathed to fire the secretary for some reason, Roosevelt installed an interventionist as 176 00:15:44.720 --> 00:15:50.880 Assistant Secretary, and waited until nearly the eve of the war in 1940 when he replaced 177 00:15:50.880 --> 00:15:58.080 Woodring with the thoroughgoing finance bank insider Henry Stimson. Also, a few more democratic 178 00:15:58.080 --> 00:16:06.080 secretaries came from outside this Bermuda Triangle of war secretaries than the Republicans, 179 00:16:06.080 --> 00:16:12.200 but only a few. On the other hand, it's likewise true that the defense, that defense is the 180 00:16:12.200 --> 00:16:20.080 and the Cabinet Position, interestingly, that probably most frequently crosses party lines, 181 00:16:20.080 --> 00:16:26.320 as with our current Defense Secretary. Clearly at times these guardians are simply interchangeable 182 00:16:26.320 --> 00:16:33.000 from party to party. Well, to conclude, this paper is part of an attempt to see the warfare-welfare 183 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:38.940 oligarchy at work. Like the news media, both political parties have acted as fronts for 184 00:16:38.940 --> 00:16:44.940 For this state elite, the appearance of tension between the two parties in matters of war-making 185 00:16:44.940 --> 00:16:51.500 has been theater in many ways, though many participants are no doubt true believers. 186 00:16:51.500 --> 00:16:56.560 Yet these ideas have to be conveyed against the backdrop of actual aggressive war-like 187 00:16:56.560 --> 00:16:59.940 activity by both parties when in power. 188 00:16:59.940 --> 00:17:05.320 The collected biographies of the Secretaries of War and Defense give us some accidental 189 00:17:05.320 --> 00:17:12.400 Insights into the War Party's Relationships. 190 00:17:12.400 --> 00:17:17.680 Though these secretaries are not the only gatekeepers of the welfare state, and maybe 191 00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:22.400 not even the most important ones, they do perform a crucial function in coordinating 192 00:17:22.400 --> 00:17:28.680 the collectivist, rent-seeking corporate entities with the political parties and their domestic 193 00:17:28.680 --> 00:17:30.360 agendas. 194 00:17:30.360 --> 00:17:33.720 They make the world safe for democracy, so to speak. 195 00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:49.720 Hence, this important interface is guarded by a special class of loyalists, usually extremely bright individuals of modest family and social status, chosen by the coercive elite to do this work, and later rewarded accordingly. 196 00:17:49.720 --> 00:17:56.080 Finally, over a century, there has been no substantial difference in the profile of the 197 00:17:56.080 --> 00:18:04.000 individuals chosen to manage the crucial coordination of business war politics, regardless of party. 198 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:07.640 It's been pretty much the same since 1900. 199 00:18:07.640 --> 00:18:13.960 I think this macrocosm can be summarized in the microcosm of the two defense secretaries, 200 00:18:13.960 --> 00:18:18.080 Frank Carlucci and Donald Rumsfeld, the old college roommates. 201 00:18:18.080 --> 00:18:21.000 They had different styles, but they remained roommates. 202 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:22.020 Applause.