G.E. President to Pentagon: “A permanent war economy”
GE President Charles Wilson in 1950, Life image via Google
I recently came across this interesting statement from Tristram Coffin’s book on militarism in America. It was written in 1964, just a few years after U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous warning about the ‘military-industrial complex’ during his farewell adress:
In 1944, the campaign had progressed so splendidly that the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, advocated to the Army Ordinance Association a working arrangement between the military and industry and “a permanent war economy.” Each company, he proposed, should have an executive with the reserve rank of colonel to be a liaison with the Pentagon. “This must be, once and for all, a continuing program. Industry’s role in this program is to respond and cooperate…. Industry must not be hampered by political witch hunts, or thrown to the fanatical isolationist fringe with a merchants of death label.”
Tristram Coffin, The Armed Society: Militarism in Modern America, 169.
Cold War Paranoia/Fantasies
This is my latest favorite procrastination tool: Life magazine images hosted by Google Image Search: http://www.life.com/Life/
But to get to the subject of this post: the question as to whether the Cold War was a projection of collective fear or paranoia but also… and at the very same time… if it was an expression of mass desire and fantasy. I found this set of photographs to be somewhat bewildering. The photos depict a town in Wisconsin, U.S.A. that staged a mock Communist invasion in 1950. Judging by the expressions on some of the faces, I think one would have to conclude that such a simulation is driven by fear mixed with desire; fear of the possibility of such an event happening but also the desire to experience it.
I often wonder what the experience of living in the U.S. in the midst of the Cold War was like for its citizens. It must have been very strange indeed.