Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/12/21 Hunter DeRensis on America’s History of Hating War Profiteers

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

Scott is joined by Hunter DeRensis to discuss a recent longform article he wrote for The American Conservative. The article was the culmination of months of research DeRensis did on the history of the American public’s perception of weapons manufacturers. DeRensis identifies the period between the World Wars as being the age with the most resistance to the war profiteers. Interestingly, that resistance was largely led by middle-class conservatives. Scott and DeRensis point to Joe Kent, who’s running for Congress in Washington State, as an example of the return of this right-wing resistance to the military-industrial complex. Discussed on the show: “Merchants Of Death” (The American Conservative)  Hunter DeRensis is communications director for BringOurTroopsHome.US and a regular contributor to The American Conservative. Find him on his website or on Twitter @HunterDeRensis. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing one of my best guys it's hunter de rinsis he's the editor at the libertarian institute and he's a really great writer and here he's got this masterpiece man it's going to take you a little while to get through it but it's totally worth it.

It's at the American Conservative magazine. Oh, and I forgot to mention, he is communications director for Bring Our Troops Home.us as well. Dan McKnight and the great guys over there. So here he is a contributor, regular contributor over at TAC. And this one is called Merchants of Death

from the Nye Committee to Joe Kent. The fight against war profiteering is a constant struggle. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Hunter? I'm doing great Scott happy to be back good to talk to you so man what a great piece

I guess I first want to ask you what got you interested in this particular topic or you know wanting to write a history of this subject the way that you've done here this is actually an idea that's been percolating in my head for about three years now

and I just finally sat down over the summer to really write it and flesh it out because the thing I really wanted to tackle with this is not necessarily a history of the military industrial complex itself, but a history of the perception of the military industrial complex. I really wanted to deep dive into how we went from the interwar period where there was mass and broad public outrage against what they referred to as the merchants of death, such was the bile against these arms manufacturers up until today when it's a very nebulous topic very little talked about doesn't get a lot of public reception and when the public does focus on it they sort of tend to view

these arms manufacturers and these military contractors is really the equivalent of any other big corporation or any other company when i think they are diametrically different from any private industry or private firm that you know produces consumer goods or actually provides a product to people. The fact is that these are corporations that feed purely on government excess and government funding, and they do so to supply weapons of war

to keep the war machine in Washington, D.C. spinning. So I really wanted to flesh out how that change happened over the past century, and maybe if enough people read the article, kind of reawaken that spirit that I wish we still had. The change being particularly the perception by regular Americans of just how American these companies are, whereas before they were considered this kind of weird and temporary emergency. In other words, it's not just your point of view here. You're harkening back to a history of people have always seen it that way up until recently.

Precisely, it's a real big shift we see at the end of World War II, and that's partially for two reasons. reasons, I would say. One is the genuine Cold War scare. From 1945 at the end of World War II, up until President Dwighty Eisenhower's speech where he actually invokes the military industrial complex in 1961, you really don't see any public knowledge, public awareness, or certainly public outrage whatsoever about the profit margins of military contractors or the growing size of the military, the spending, where it's going, because the public, for the most part, is in such a fever dream over the, quote-unquote, Soviet threat. They see the rise of the Soviet Union. They see Khrushchev, you know, smashing down at the United Nations, and they take him at his word, that this is a threat.

And, hey, if these weapons contractors make a little bit money, you know, that's really beside the point. I mean, we're about to go into a nuclear showdown with the communists. We have just got to focus on that. And the other thing is that during this period, you see such a massive growth of the Pentagon and the national security state and as a byproduct, these weapons contractors, that they become normalized. They're no longer this sort of alien attachment onto the economy as the U.S. economy during the entirety of the Cold War becomes much similar to just being attached to. to the government and well well there these companies are making their money off of government contracts but then again almost half the economy is making money off of government contracts really what's the difference at this point so it's partially that growth normalizes it and partially just

the politics of the moment we're not very conducive to public criticism uh of these companies right you know it's an ironic thing right that um you know when dwight eisenhower says it's okay because what are you going to do? He's a five-star general turned president, a commander of all allied forces in World War II in Europe and all of this. So if he says, hey, it's a real problem, the way big business uses their influence to keep the war machine going for their own benefit at the expense of the American people and ultimately, you know, possibly at the expense of their security, at the same time, the footage is in black and white. and it seems so long ago it's so long before so many of us were born including me i know i'm old but

i ain't that old um and so um and of course the problem was never resolved right and yet uh it seems like as you said they kind of have won their victory here the people have just sort of rolled over and accepted that that is just or i don't know if that's really right but something like that right it's been it's been very normal the way that, you know, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, where these are just American brands like Coca-Cola and Levi's and whatever else. It all just is the same difference. Well, I think it's the point you just made about the American people sort of rolling over on this. It's a point that I address at the end of the article where I try to put a hopeful spin on it and something I generally do want to believe.

it's not so much that the American people have completely conceded on this issue where they said, oh, we don't care. It's more like within the past couple decades, certainly after the launch of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the American people really haven't been asked these questions. And I interviewed several experts for this article, most of which have been on your program at one time or another. and I asked them, hey, is there any polling that I can include on this or polling that I can find? Where are you really asking the American people about these issues? And one after another, they say, no. The fact is that Americans are typically asked by pollsters,

oh, what do you think about the military budget? Should it be more or less? Or maybe they'll get even specific and say, hey, we're selling weapons to X or Y country. Do you think that's a good thing? But when it comes to the actual part of the system, whether these companies should be making enormous profits, whether Lockheed Martin should be getting rich off of selling weapons to the government, which half the time don't work are over budget and over time, they don't get asked to that. So we can't really even say what their answer is. And I'll read the very first opening line of the article, which is simply asking the question, is it unethical to profit off the mass death of your countrymen and should something be done about it?

I would love to see a poll asking Americans that exact question and getting their answer. Because even at this point, I still think if you brought it to the attention of Americans and asked what they think, They would say, no, I don't like that system. No, I don't like war profiteering. And no, I don't think the top five Pentagon weapons contractors should be making billions and billions of dollars off the backs of American servicemen dying in these wars. Yeah, it's funny how you might think,

if you were new here, that the companies that make the weapons do it sort of on a non-profit basis just to chip in as a peasant, patriotic thing for the war effort, because you wouldn't want to have a conflict of interest there or anything. But obviously, if it's really necessary for American security to make some planes and some tanks to help Uncle Sam go and defend the homeland, then surely they would do that, right? But obviously what happens, this is exactly what happens when they're allowed to set the price at whatever they want, of course, and, you know, as it would ever be. I mean, that's the thing if as long as there's a task such as maintaining global hegemony then we'll need a

military force up to that task and then so of course that's why the arms industry finances the think tanks that write the studies that justify it all and you know of course spend so much money on the media as well and their influence in the media in order to just essentially yeah keep it all normalized in the mind of the american people who could object to building new ships and submarines and planes don't you want america to be secure right that's some weird you know marginal hippie view not something mainstream um something that if it has an american history hunter it probably goes back to janus joplin and the summer of love in 1967 right something like that it's why i thought it was so important to

include a lot of the history in this piece because really you could divide the article that we're discussing down the middle when the first one the first half is a very historical piece going back in time and the second half is discussing a lot of statistics and the politics of it today because you're exactly right that people associate these views and these criticisms of pentagon contractors as oh this is just you know the far left hippies etc and And in the 60s enough, what's interesting is, as you said, it takes Dwight D. Eisenhower for this Republican five-star general to come and actually make this case. But even in the 1960s, in the first couple of years after his farewell address,

it is the hippie activists who are using the military-industrial complex term, you know, invoking this Republican president, strangely enough. But I wanted to go back even farther to the interwar period. where you see a very broad, to use a turn of phrase, middle-class conservatism, rise up against our system of weapons contracting and against war profiteering. And the fact is that the idea that these companies hold too much influence in our politics and that it is wrong that they are making such excessive profits during wartime

and that because of that incentive, they are helping us getting into these wars, that was a concept that was shared overwhelmingly by Americans. I mentioned in the article that at a certain point, by the mid-1930s, that position is held by numerous organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Federation of Labor, the National Grange, Hearst's newspaper change. A chain, the National Education Association, this was a very well-accepted mainstream idea that these weapons manufacturers are pernicious influence on our politics and that the public has to do something to prevent them from getting us into more wars that are good for them but bad for the American people. And I think it'd be, I think it's incumbent on people who share our views, people who identifies libertarian or in a specific conservative tradition to focus more on these people because Dave Smith, a friend of yours, great podcaster, he mentioned recently that it's good to care about libertarian ideas, but at the end of the day, it takes real flesh and blood. men and women to make those ideas a reality. And that's why I love and think it's so important to look back at our history, look back at the intellectual tradition in American history that you and I, Scott, are a part of and say, hey, these people, Robert LaFollett, William Bora, Hiram Johnson, and in this article, Gero Nye, these are men who, at their eras, stood up

against the burgeoning military industrial complex and called out these war profiteers and said, I am an American, I'm proud of my country, and I don't like what you're doing to my country and my neighbors and making these profits off the deaths of our sons. And I think we should take inspiration from that and really embrace that deep, rich, intellectual tradition and realize that you and I stand on the shoulders of these jobs,

And we need to embrace that and make sure more people today are aware of that. You and I didn't just spring up out of nowhere. We're carrying on the message that these men helped start. Okay, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott here for easyship.com. Man, who wants to use stamps.com? They're terrible. Their website is a disaster.

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Right, yeah. It's really important exactly that, as you said, a certain kind of conservative tradition, you know, often called the paleos, but not just them, but more America First or an old riotist types, that, you know, it's made known that there's such a thing. I mean, people might not know that conservatism means anything other than, you know, I don't know, Rush Limbaugh republicanism or something like that when there's a whole other thing to it. Um, so anyway, talk about some of these, uh, older heroes here. You write about, um, it's Senator Nye or Congressman Nye here. I forgot, North Dakota. Senator. Right. Uh, so who is he and what was he about? Uh, so Gerald Nye was from North Dakota. Uh, he started his career as a newspaper editor. Uh, interestingly enough, I, I always find this curious as a newspaper editor in 1917. he actually supported going into World War I. Similarly, it's actually Hiram Johnson, William Bora, both vote to go to war at the time,

and it's only in reaction to the war where they see the chaos and the disaster it is that they turn four square against further American intervention. So, you know, sort of lesson learned kind of thing, which I always find very interesting. Gerald Nye is, you could say, LaFalette Republican in the tradition of Robert LaFalette, Wisconsin. He self-identifies as economically progressive, anti-biginess, anti-monopoly, but simultaneously very much a nationalist, a believer in the America First mantra, a believer in national sovereignty and peace abroad for the American people. He's appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1925, wins a full term in 1926, and really becomes known in Washington, D.C. as a

reformer. In the 1920s, he was involved in the investigations on the committee looking into Teapot Dome and that political scandal of the 1920s. And for his investigations into that, he actually gets nicknamed Gerald the Giant Slayer, which is a phenomenal nickname. And eventually, we get to 1934, when there is enough public interest and enough work being done by interested legislators and interested activists to form a committee, the special committee on investigation of the munitions industry, to really investigate weapons contractors and the companies that made enormous profits during World War I. And Nye becomes the chair of this committee, and it becomes colloquially known as the Nye Committee. In fact, it was a senator,

George W. Norris and a peace activist named Dorothy Detzer who sat down and said, hey, we're going to form this committee. We're going to get it done. Who should we make the public face of this? Who do we put in charge? George Norris, who was an extremely progressive Republican from Nebraska, said, I'm too old. I can't do it at this point. Who else can we fine. And Detzer and Norris went down a list of all 96 U.S. senators crossing off names. And at the very end, the only one remaining is Gerald Nye, because he was honest and interested. And they knew he would do a capable job of bringing this issue to the public attention. And Nye really reveled in that. I think it's accurate that he's typically remembered as a bit of a hot

head. He was a very inflammatory speaker. He wasn't afraid to speak his mind. Although I am sympathetic to Norris's argument that while Nye has these personality traits, we can write them off as quote, the rashness of enthusiasm.

And Scott, who of us haven't been guilty of the rashness of enthusiasm? And Nye was not afraid to really get in the public image. All through 1934 and 1935, when the committee was active, calling witnesses and calling the business records of these

companies to be investigated and publicly revealed, Nye is regularly giving interviews, radio addresses, newspaper, and quoted newspapers. These are real headliners, and he's not afraid to stand up and say, one quote I include in the article, the time is coming where there will be a realization of what monkeys, the munition makers can make of the otherwise intelligent people of America. So, and as the chair of this committee, they're investigating this, and I'll quote them again because there's no other way to put it than just in his own words. The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts, which found them nothing

more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself. And they find criminal and unethical actions among these industries, including lobbying U.S. governments to obtain foreign sales, bribing foreign officials, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences, which were very popular and very common during the interwar period. and their solutions you could say were impractical or maybe just the best solution in this very difficult issue and certainly I would love to see a very good debate among libertarians on whether or not these are the best solutions primarily the Nye Committee concluded that there needed to be a massive transference of construction from private shipyards

and private manufacturers to public where the government is producing its own weapons instead of buying them from a private corporation that there needed to be price controls on a lot of these military armaments and that they needed higher industrial taxes for instance And I loved, if not the exact policy of this, I loved where it came from in the heart at the very least, because Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on income higher than $10,000, and that's $10,000 in 1935, I'm not sure what that translates to today, but taxes higher than that should go up to 98%, almost a full confiscation.

And Nye's logic for this was saying, do that and then observe the number of jingoists diminish. So going after the people who favor war right in the pocketbook. And I think the Nation magazine Progressive then and now said at the time that if such a policy were ever implemented, businessmen would become our leading pacifists. And I don't know. It brings a smile to my face, even imagining Wall Street firms going. to Congress saying, guys, we got to stop bombing Yemen. We're making no money here. This is a disaster. Please bring our troops home. I, you know, just imagining the CEO of J.P. Morgan, Chase,

you know, bringing that up is just comical in my mind. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was the great part of that was even in my notes, too, where you quote, I'm sorry, who was it that you quoted saying that, man, you know, this having to go to war all the time is really bad for business. And we want to get back to the business of capitalism before Harry Truman intervened and put them all on the dole? That was actually Pierre S. DuPont, the president of the DuPont Company. The man himself, huh? He was the one who framed it that way. Yes. Yes, it was the man himself who said at the time, basically what I call in the article, the most cogent and succinct rebuttal to the merchants of death thesis, the idea that these corporations... I hate history so much.

My committee gets taken over by Harry Truman, and then he's the guy, What Dun, did it to us all after that, you know? Mm-hmm. It's, history's a fun and wild place, and you get these great cast of characters that I was really happy to shine a light on. I just want to expand real briefly on your mention of DuPont, because it is Pierre S. DuPont, the head of the DuPont company, that made a lot of these exorbitant profits during World War I, who supplied a majority of the gunpowder to the ally. and saw their stocks go from about $20 a share to $1,000 a share by the end of the war, it's him who makes the most cogent response for why you don't have to worry about military contractors, because he explains, hey, you know, wars are temporary, they're sudden, they're not conducive to long-term capital investment.

I run a business, a new war comes up. Sure, I'll fill this stuff and I might get a profit in the short term, but eventually that war is going to end, and I'm going to be left holding all of this merchandise and all of these new factories and everything that I constructed, and it's just not profitable in the long term. No business can survive just on war. And he is correct to an extent that in the 1930s, the DuPont Company, for instance, less than 1% of their market share is coming from government contractors. So he was correct at the time. But that's why we see the major switch after World War II, when you see the creation of the national security state, you see the Department of Defense created, the Central Intelligence Agency, and war becomes a permanent fixture of American life. The military budgets don't go down anymore. And it is now possible in a way DuPont could not have foreseen even a decade prior for these companies to make their profits,

completely off of Pentagon Chum and I laid out the numbers in the article Lockheed Martin the largest defense contractor in the world in 19 sorry in 2017 received 88% of its revenue from arms sales

and all the rest go down that the out of the top five the smallest one is Boeing which only gets a third of its profits from Pentagon contracts so the fact is that these I As a libertarian and as a capitalist, I don't see any way we could describe these companies as private firms.

They are simply extensions of the government, and I think should be treated as such, because the fact is if you take away the warfare state we live under, then you would instantaneously suffocate these companies out of existence because they exist purely to service the Pentagon and service the war. state that has us, you know, invading countries in the Middle East, bombing even more across Africa, and creating this global hegemony. All right. Give us one minute here on your last major subject in the article. Who is Joe Kent? Joe Kent is a candidate running for Congress in Washington's third district. He's challenging a 10-term incumbent Republican Congresswoman, but early poll show he's already

leading in the race. He's been endorsed by Donald Trump and several conservative members of Congress, so he's seen as a viable candidate. And the interesting thing about Joe Kent is that he is a veteran. He's a former Green Beret. He deployed, I believe, 11 times into combat. And he speaks about the military industrial complex. He says that these companies are taking the American people for a ride, that they are profiting off of these wars, and that it's these financial and incentives that are getting us in these wars in the first place, and he believes it. Joe Kent makes a very strong point in the interview I did with him and on the campaign trail, speaking about his wife who also served in the military and who was killed in the Mambige bombing

in Syria in 2019 after Donald Trump said that we need to get out of Syria, an ISIS attack kills his wife because the Pentagon slow rolled the withdrawal until it didn't happen. and kept U.S. troops there. And when he says, I hate the military industrial complex, we need to investigate this and they're leading our wars, I believe him. I think it comes from the heart, and I think we need to focus on more candidates

who are doing this message. And like I said earlier in the interview, who are bringing a message to the American people that most of them are probably unfamiliar with. When you get Joe Kent, former Green Beret, bringing up this point saying, hey, look at these companies who are leading us, into these wars and who are profiting off the deaths of these soldiers, is this a problem?

I think most Americans are going to hear him say that and hear others say that and say, yeah, let's do something about that. Especially being a war veteran and a Republican that makes it, and it should make it. And pay attention, right wingers, that makes it okay for you to think so too. And for liberals and leftists, this gives you an opportunity to say to your alleged leaders that, hey, even these Republicans are saying this stuff now. You've got to be at least as good as them, right? And invoke their being good on it, the rights being good on it as proof of how right you are,

that even they say this is a big problem and that's the real consensus that it is and invoke that and hold your liberal so-called leaders to at least that same standard. But anyway, now we're out of time and got to go. But thank you so much for this. This is great ammo for everyone out there looking to attack the right from the right. Show this to your old father-in-law or whoever it is you're picking a fight with lately. Merchants of Death at the American Conservative magazine from the Nye Committee to Joe Kent. The fight against war profiteering is a constant struggle.

Great job on this. Really appreciate it, Hunter. Thank you so much, Scott. Really happy to be here. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM, L. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.