Missiles and Magnolias: The South at War

On December 8, 1941, the United States rose to the startling news that it was at war. Pearl Harbor had been bombed, and a nation once torn over joining the violent conflagration of Europe’s great powers decided to put differences aside, and unite for battle.

In the outreaches of rural Georgia, residents of the sleepy town of Marietta — a struggling Atlanta satellite — viewed the events of December 1941 with interest. What they couldn’t know is that due to the events of December, they, just like their country, would soon be thrust onto the world stage of conflict.

Washington was scrambling to find a place to mass-produce a “superbomber” that could answer Pearl Harbor, and their eyes soon turned to Marietta. The town boasted a can-do attitude, a large pool of unemployed workers, a union-free business climate — and leaders willing to hand over the local airport to sweeten the deal. So it was with great fanfare that, in January 1942, town officials announced that Marietta had won dibs for Air Force Plant #6, Bell Aircraft Company’s coveted facility to build the B-29 bomber.

Overnight Marietta went from small town to boom town. Plant #6 would put 28,000 Georgians to work, churn out hundreds of aircraft, and create a mammoth manufacturing infrastructure over the next three years. After the war, the factory switched over to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, but its military ties proved lasting: today, the plant is still a favored source of Pentagon air power, and employs more Georgians than other business in the state.

Of course, Georgia wasn’t the only place to be remade by militarism. Marietta is just one of dozens of Southern cities that saw their fortunes rise with America’s World War II ascendance as a global military power.

Today, more than any other region, the South remains ensnared by the politics, economics and culture of war, reaping the rewards — and shouldering the burdens — of administering a seemingly permanent military-industrial complex. The region hosts more than its share of war business; elects the most hawkish politicians to office; and supplies 42 percent of the nation’s enlistees — all products of the unique relationship with militarism that took root in Marietta and the South half a century ago.

“The Good War”

In 1938, President Roosevelt commissioned the Report on Economic Conditions of the South, and the findings study found, “is a belt of sickness, misery, and unnecessary death.” Upon the study’s release, Roosevelt famously concluded that the U.S. South was “the nation’s number one economic problem.”

Yet only six years later, Donald M. Nelson, Chair of the U.S. War Production Board, found a South that “has rubbed Aladdin’s lamp” and is poised to enter “the vanguard of world industrial progress.”

Separating these warring views of Southern fortunes, of course, was World War II, a watershed moment for the expansion of U.S. geopolitical influence and the rise of Southern economic prowess.

Companies like Bell Bomber, Lockheed Aircraft, and General Dynamics flooded into the South to do wartime business, pumping some $4 billion worth of military production into the Southern economy. This was only 17.6 percent of the national total — lower than the South’s share of population — but far surpassed the region’s industrial capacity entering the war.

Thousands flocked to the shipyards from Norfolk, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, to Houston and Orange, Texas, and the aircraft plants that sprang up in Dallas/Fort Worth and Marietta, Georgia, with assembly plants in Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville, Birmingham and Miami. By 1945, the wartime duo of ships and planes combined as the South’s second biggest employer, second only to the stalwart textile industry — itself surging to clothe the war effort.

The wartime boost was felt everywhere: every Southern state had an ordnance plant producing explosives. Half of the nation’s synthetic rubber came from refineries in Louisiana and Texas. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, made its mark by processing uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

But the war provided more than just an economic boost. Of the 12 million wartime servicemen, over a third were stationed in the South, leading historian George Tindall to argue “the South remained more campground than arsenal.” New Deal investment also loosened the grip of the Old South elite and gave rise to a new political class of “business progressives” who welcomed federal defense and research dollars, but turned away federal aid to the poor and resisted challenges to the color line.

War also set the tone for the South’s future development. Prosperity was not evenly distributed, as historian Bruce J. Schulman argues in Cottonbelt to Sunbelt: “New industry concentrated in predominantly white areas, restricting opportunities for black southerners. In the nonmetropolitan South, heavily black counties suffered employment declines in the 1950s and 1960s.”

The war boom also concentrated in sectors, like aerospace, that were too young to be significantly unionized. Shortly afterwards, the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act and the anti-communism of the McCarthy era paralyzed new labor organizing, so the region was able to maintain its “favorable business climate” and lure even more defense companies south.

The South’s permanent war economy — and the region’s dependence on the military dollar — was born.

Where the Hawks Roost

War is still good business in the South, the result of a powerful marriage between hawkish politicians and a defense industry unafraid to flex its political muscle.

Every region of the country has expanded its defense base since 1996, but the South has led the way with an 83 percent increase, followed by the West with gains of 62 percent. In contrast, Northeastern states saw contract increases of only 9 percent, and the Midwest and Central Plains states expanded by only 21 percent.

While defense hubs like California, Connecticut, and Washington are holding their own, the military industry is shifting towards the states of the old Confederacy, with defense contracts doubling in Virginia and Florida and skyrocketing 216 percent in Texas in the past five years.

Greasing the way for Southern military contracts is the Southern congressional delegation, which has developed a reputation for unfailing loyalty to the defense industry.

Five of the top 10 congressional recipients of military dollars in the 2001-2002 election cycle are Southerners, including Alabama Senators Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, both Republicans; Republican Senator Thad Cochrane of Mississippi; Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia; and Representative James Moran Jr., who represents the 8th district of northern Virginia.

In turn, Southern politicians have established a pro-military voting record that ensures military investment in the region. According to Peace Action, in 2000, fully 62 percent of senators from the South voted 100 percent for expanding military operations, while only 53 percent of their colleagues in other regions of the nation did so. The delegations from Alabama, Kentucky and Mississippi were unanimous in their pro-defense commitments.

No state has nurtured the relationship between military money and political power like Texas. In 1948, Lyndon B. Johnson’s run for the U.S. Senate was largely backed by a Texas construction company, Brown & Root. When Johnson deployed troops to Vietnam, Brown & Root received millions in contracts to build roads, military bases, landing strips and harbors.

Three decades later, Brown & Root had become a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the world’s largest oil services company, and headed by future vice president Dick Cheney. The revolving door of Halliburton’s corporate structure is peopled by the architects of the United States’ foreign policy, most directly through Cheney’s conducting of the Gulf War as the first President Bush’s secretary of defense. Halliburton director Lawrence Eagleburger was deputy secretary of state in the same administration.

In 2001, Halliburton again revealed its clout when it won a virtually unlimited nine-year contract from the Pentagon to build infrastructure for troop deployments through the duration of the current “anti-terrorist” war.

The Business of War

While defense dollars have touched every comer of the South, certain areas have come into their own as favored centers of military might.

The northern Virginia suburbs of Washington with Internet technology and outsourced defense intelligence operations; the Cape Canaveral area of Florida with global positioning and communication technology; Huntsville, Alabama, with its missile production and Fortune 500 companies clustered around the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Cummings Research Park; and Fort Worth, with the massive production facilities of Lockheed Martin Aerospace — all continue to flourish with defense stimulus.

The sprawling Hampton Roads area of Virginia and Atlanta have garnered some of the largest contracts: $6.6 billion and $4.1 billion respectively, in 2001. Hampton Roads’ Northrop Grumman- Newport News Shipbuilding, like Marietta, Georgia’s Air Force Plant #6, is the largest private employer in the state.

Yet in other areas, the military economy is more fragile. Fort Bragg, located near Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Fort Campbell, near Clarksville, Tennessee, are major employers and sustain an insecure retail economy, but don’t account for the enormous expenditures doled out for aerospace and technology. Military bases’ primary economic impact is in construction and food service contracts, which are often awarded to out-of-state companies.

Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi — also owned by Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman — continues to be the state’s largest private employer, but its fortunes have dimmed. Mississippi’s defense contract allotment has declined by 42 percent in the past five years.

And then there are states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas, which have maintained a durable independence from the war economy. Notable exceptions to this rule are contracts to General Electric Aircraft Engines in Madisonville, Kentucky, and to Lockheed Martin Missile & Fire Control in Camden, Arkansas. West Virginia received only one prime defense contract in 2001, for less than $9 million.

Breaking with Militarism

Before World War II, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota held congressional hearings to investigate ties between the Navy, War Department and major arms manufacturers. Nye’s office concluded that war profiteering had manipulated the democratic process.

Such debate seems unimaginable today, yet militarism’s persistent inertia — for bigger and more expensive weapons systems, more dangerous and more questionable troop deployments — continues to tighten its grip on the South. A permanent war culture has not only diverted away the resources of social development, but created a self-sustaining logic that ensures the inevitability of war.

As President Eisenhower’s warned before leaving office in 1961, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”