A Military History of the American Suburbs, the Discipline of Economics, and All Things Ordinary

A Military History of the American
 Suburbs, the Discipline of Economics,
      and All Things Ordinary
                                      Catherine Lutz
      Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA;
                          catherine_lutz@brown.edu

The United States’ failing counterinsurgency wars of the 2000s birthed a
number of new ideas, as crises often do. One of the most striking, rapidly
becoming banal, is that warfare must be fought not only on geographic
terrain but also on “human terrain”. From those wars has emerged
the idea not only that the social sciences have much to contribute
to their successful prosecution, but the notion that the idea itself
represents the next stage in the progressive evolution of modern warfare.
Counterinsurgency planners tell us that human thinking and affect are the
primary terrain which must be mapped and conquered in order to defeat
or convert the enemy, or to at least render the surrounding population
neutral in that struggle of wills which is called counterinsurgency war.
This human terrain can be successfully captured with knowledge about
the enculturated human hearts and minds and the specific and often
exotic social orders that create and motivate enemy and population.
   The rich and incisive papers pulled together by Matthew Farish
and Patrick Vitale for this issue of Antipode describe the complex
topography of the human terrain of the United States, at war in one
way or another since the 1940s. None of that terrain emerges anew
during World War II and the Cold War, of course; the United States was
made through war from its sixteenth century beginnings, shaped by the
security concerns that have been colonialism and slavery’s racializing
twin. But what is different in the period these papers describe is the
massively increased scale of spending on both the weaponry and science
of war: that investment begins to spike in the late 1930s and never really
wanes. The new political economic climate of that era allowed, for the
first time, massive state spending on preparing for war and preparing
the war’s investors—the US citizenry—for permanent war. What would
need shaping were expectations of threat, and increasingly, as Morrissey
notes, risk as well.
Antipode Vol. 43 No. 3 2011 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 901–906
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00829.x

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   Each paper begins with one of those state investments: government
contracts to weapons makers like Westinghouse Electric and
Manufacturing Company and a new tax code that made wartime
advertising deductible (Vitale); funding for academic researchers, as
at the University of Washington, whose work both discovered and
made propaganda’s effects (Pinkerton, Young and Dodds); spending
on highways and the tax code’s new mortgage deduction that shaped
the race- and class-reproducing suburbanization process that helped
militarize citizenship (Loyd); and the funding of a huge standing army
and a global network of military bases (Morrissey). Little—or much
less—could have happened without these investments.
   The papers also encourage us to look for the unexpected faces of
militarization. The unexpected—like the necessity of an emotional wage
for highly paid workers—is found in an obvious location, a war factory
(Vitale), and the unexpected relation to war is found in a non-obvious
place—like the disenfranchised inner city and its co-construction with
the “security mom” (Loyd). It allows us to see even car advertising, then,
and its marketing of an unsafe world outside the car, as a securitizing
device that both built a generalized fear but also suggested mass transit
was neither attractive, necessary, nor even quite American.
   The actors involved in these political economies, whether located at
the Pentagon, military industry, or among anti-war dissident groups,
have pursued their goals with the insight that they are engaged in a
battle to create public opinions, public myopias, and public secrets.
They have recognized that the most accessible, and in some ways the
most important, human terrain for such work is on the homefront rather
than on the battlefield, and that there is in fact not much of a distinction
with a difference between the two.
   The homefront, that melded civilian–military world, is hidden in
plain sight in the contemporary United States. This is demonstrated
most dramatically by Loyd in her examination of peace movement
rhetoric which argued for the protection of children from the war
system while leaving those children and the question of who war harms
racially unmarked. And that melding of the civilian and military is
demonstrated in Washington communities which responded much more
negatively to the threat of commercialism in the early leaflet tests
than to the threat of explicit militarism in the later tests (Pinkerton,
Young, and Dodds). Today, that meld is evident in the fact that support
for military interventionism is often stronger among those in civilian
clothes than in uniforms; the fact that military recruiters can sell their
institution as the missing father for over-indulged or mother-dominated
youth; and the fact that local school budgets regularly go to pay
the salaries of JROTC military instructors, instructors whose classes
promote values that they simultaneously claim are special “military
values” and universal “American values”. And the meld is evident in a

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Google search for “homefront”, which produces a shooter video game
based on the premise that, “In the aftermath of a devastating global
energy crisis, America’s industries and resources have been brutally
seized by a nuclear-armed North Korea. The military is dismantled and
civil liberties are crushed.” A valiant insurgency emerges. It is in such
fantasies that the various historical moments detailed in this issue begin
and end, and in which the next battleground is prepared.
   The four cases in this issue were all shaped by cultural hegemonies
that emerged within the military–industrial–media–entertainment
network (der Derian 2009) or, more fully, the military–industrial–
media–entertainment–academic network. They illustrate the importance
of research on the mentalities and the fullest context of the lives of
war workers, whether in uniform, industry, academia, or media, and the
lives of anti-war workers. Industrial and professional workers in military
industries have been especially invisible, despite their importance in the
process of reproducing military budgets and discourses on their value
(but see Gusterson 1996). Also invisible are academic war workers, such
as those Pinkerton, Young, and Dodds examine. They bring cultural
capital to the idea of national security and economic capital to the
university system in the form of indirect costs, and these are but
the public parts of the story. Soldiers, too, remain to be studied as the
participant-observers of empire (Brown and Lutz 2007) or as conflicted
or dissident objectors (Gutmann and Lutz 2010).
   It is only with a person-centered history, ethnography, or geography
that we can begin to work out the motivations, ambivalences, and moral
vacuums that make a war system work (including work by not working)
and grow. These papers remind us that, long before the issuance and
fanfare around a new US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field
Manual in 2006, strategic actors have recognized that warfare requires
cultural deployments, affective munitions, and mental recruitment.
   So Vitale demonstrates the power of the emotional wage that
war factories, like every employer, must provide alongside monetary
compensation. Knowing that human resource departments work
particularly hard at this with low-wage workers, we can then ask why
high-paid military industrial workers needed such a wage. We can ask
how such workers come to value their work in the face of potential
anxieties about violence and its moralities. One way is through a pledge
aiming to build a sense of “responsibility toward the war”. Here, as in
the other contexts, the goal was to create a sense of collective project,
to convince the public that a war is “our” war, these young people “our”
soldiers, better yet “our” boys and girls. Its project was to convince the
public that there may be a division of labor and a hierarchy of value in
war work, but no inequality of responsibility. Then as now: it is to touch
the third rail of American politics today to suggest, on left or right, that
the war in Iraq is not the public’s own.

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   The emotional labor the residents of Washington State contributed to
the Cold War effort was their fear. That fear was provoked in part by
Project Revere’s leafleting, but there were other means by which people
were encouraged to turn their attention from the bull’s-eye on Hiroshima
and Moscow, and to reimagine it instead on their own hometowns. It is
hard to underestimate the power of the experience of eating breakfast
over a newspaper with maps of US cities surrounded by concentric
rings marking the extent of vaporization, then fire and blast damage, then
radiation sickness (but see Green 1999). Millions of soldiers and military
communities worked, navigationally and emotionally, with war gaming
maps that imagined counterinsurgency campaigns in their domestic
double: in the 1960s, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne “fought” insurgents
on the terrain of “Pineville”, using maps that were in fact Fayetteville,
North Carolina in the 1960s, while Marines today find “Iraqi cities” in
the Mojave Desert. The cultural terrain has become more specific and
“realistic”; the emotional work remains the same. As Loyd shows, there
is inequality in the affective labor and in the redistributional effects of
the military budget by region, race, and gender that remain to be detailed
(Markusen and Yudken 1992), an analysis that must push against the
powerful fiction of national unity of which she acutely reminds us.
   The power of the rule of experts (Mitchell 2002) is clear throughout
these four cases. Emerging early in the twentieth century history of
war in the United States were experts in propaganda, communications,
public relations and advertising (Simpson 1994), as well as experts in
domestic social order—such as urban planning or home economics—
who did the work of war, if less obviously. These experts are all,
in a sense, professional geographers of the human terrain of the US
population. They developed methods of selecting, training, and retaining
their uniformed employees, and those practices would then migrate out
to the civilian world (for example, the industry of cognitive testing or
the use of visible markers of institutional success in the badges and
coins of rank, campaign, merit, or group as Westinghouse used in World
War II). Like Mitchell’s colonial and development expert in Egypt, these
experts have often been unaware that their objects—the citizen soldier,
the warrior industrial riveter, the volatile and insecure Middle East—
exist nowhere so much as in the imagination and social practices of
these professionals themselves.
   So it is that the communications scientists dropping leaflets over
Washington, Utah, and Idaho in the early 1950s, in tracing the movement
of those leaflets and conversations about them, hope to find, but also in
fact create, an alert, militarized citizenry. (And they do so within a very
mechanistic framework that appears to emerge from or at least mimic
the discourse of the engineering degrees of the US Air Force funders of
their work.) The strategic experts who plan for US military control of the
Middle East draw less on a West Point engineering degree than a Chicago

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School of economics degree. They imagine and then create their object,
a geoeconomics that frames US military ambitions in the Middle East
as a necessary and permanent process of securing economic flows and
financial predictability. The empire of bases that the USA has established
since World War II has changed less in response to emerging threats than
to emerging discourses of justification (see Lipman 2008; Lutz 2009).
And those discourses of justification have morphed in important ways
with the rise of neoliberalism, with the Pentagon’s strategic thinkers
speaking of military projects with a more anti-political language of
efficient and rational goal pursuit (Wool 2007).
   This range of military experts uses the technologies of pledges,
leaflets, and less obviously but no less importantly, road building,
urban renewal, and suburbanization to create practices and affects.
In Westinghouse factories, the goal was instilling “guilt and shame”
in workers who were encouraged to see themselves as only aspiring
to, but never really quite reaching, the level of sacrifice, risk and
contribution of the uniformed soldier. The company presented itself not
as a place where workers faced high risk of industrial death or maiming
(which they did; Adams 1994), but rather transformed the workplace
into a kind of battlefront always under threat of attack by the enemy
or the worker’s sloppiness, absenteeism, or poor nutritional choices.
Here and elsewhere, the task was not simply to inculcate new practices
but new sentiments—feelings of inadequacy towards the task of self-
care, feelings that make up gendered political subjectivities recruited
to war work, and the emergence of notions of risk and threat that
allowed anything to be weaponized, from the lunch one feeds oneself to
international trading and resource flows, to the idea of culture itself.

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