UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging Deeper: September 27, 2004, 7:00 p.m.

Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

Introduction: Making War at Home. Overview: many of the effects of “war and war preparation” invisible; “we all inhabit an army camp” (1-3). Fayetteville and its “bad reputation” described (3-7). Six-year anthropological and historical study concludes the “distinction between things civil and things military . . . has for decades been an illusion” (7-9).

Ch. 1: Encampment: Boosters, Social Crisis, and a Military Solution (1918-1939). Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce lands a military base, 1918 (11-13). Native American history (13-14). Tuscarora War against Indians, early 18th c. (14). Arrival of Scots; American Revolution (14). Foundation of Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry (FILI) in 1793, the 2nd oldest continuously operating militia in U.S. (15, 17-18). Race war dominant theme of local history, suppression of blacks’ advances (15-23). Acquisition of land in the Sandhills area (ultimately, 161,000 acres) (24-29). Construction of Camp Bragg, 1918 (29-33). “Preparedness movement” enlists militarization as way to “regenerate” American moral character (33-36). In 1920s, peacetime soldiers looked down upon (36-39). 1930s: appreciation in Depression of steady income and relative sophistication of military, but strong antiwar sentiments (39-43).

Ch. 2: Hostess to the “Good War” (1939-1947). Photo of civilian women telephone operators (45-47). 1939 as shift to “national security” ethos (47-49). Eightfold expansion of army, 1939-1941 (49). Fort Bragg expands (49-51). Reminiscences of the influx of soldiers (51-56). Sex & class barriers to dating (56-59). War-induced changes in

division of labor (59-61). Racial discrimination against black soldiers (64-66). August 1941 racial fighting; killing of Ned Turman, black private from South Carolina (67-71). Small steps toward fairer treatment (71-75). Martha Duell, French war bride, becomes town civic leader (75-79). Demobilization; economic anxieties (79-83). WWII’s “largely conservative” social effects (83-84). Institution of the national security state (84-86).

Ch. 3: Simulating War at Home: Counterinsurgencies, Foreign and Domestic. Implications of the “nuclear mode of warfare” (88-93). Local effects minimal (93-94). Growth of special forces; typical exercises (94-99). Uncertain degrees of complicity among local residents (99-102). “Pineland”: Fayetteville re-imagined as territory of Fort Bragg war games (102-05). Extent of land devoted to war preparation (105-07). Impact on Fayetteville (107-08). Purposes of war games (108). Gaming as “dominant frame” (108-09). “The real war facing America throughout the 1950s was not about communism but, as for so long, race” (109). The color line (110-12). Militarization subsumes other social conflicts (Michael Sherry) (112-13). Cold War’s imperatives and their impact on struggle over racial justice (113-15). Military’s hesitant contribution to racial progress (116-18). Paul Lewis (118-20). Charles Easley (120-21). Demonstrations and sit-ins (122-24). Economic justice issues (124-25). City resolution against Klan sign on main road to interstate, 1967 (125-26). Gertha Gibson, day care programs (126-28). Dr. Mason Quick, black doctor (128-29). Cold War led to problem of race being “mistaken” for problem of communism (130).

Ch. 4: Carnival, Carnage, and Quakers: The Vietnam War on Hay Street. Understanding of Vietnam’s impact made difficult by “an overwhelming focus” on the “huge cultural figure” of “the returning veteran and his experience” (131-33). Carnivalesque Hay Street (133-37). Media obscured rather than depicted war’s realities (137-38). Discontent and dissent, often focused on racial issues, in military (138-47). GIs United Against the War, & Bragg Briefs (140-41). Quaker House (141, 150-51, 164). Cultural antipathies; the Jeffrey McDonald murder case (145-46). Bill Carothers, GI turned activist (147-50). Antimilitarism seems “exotic” to most in Fayetteville (151). Gary Johnson, military trainer, on “the military mind” (152-54). Memories of the dead (154-55). Memories of an antiwar youth (156-57). Conflicted feelings of military children (158-60). Secrecy (161-66). Reception of media reports on the Vietnam war (162-63). Vietnam weakened legitimacy of U.S. government, on the right even more than on the left (166-67). All Volunteer Force; recruitment ads have militarized culture (167-68). Myths like the “spitting” one “have great power to shape what can be said and what cannot ― that soldiers stopped the war” (170).

Ch. 5: Many Reserve Armies: The Faces of Military Dependency (1974-2000). Two economies (171-72). Relatively deleterious effects of military spending (174-77). Maintained by “iron pentagon” of interests: military contractors, Dept. of Defense; weapons labs; Congress; military industry labor (177-78). Fayetteville as a company town. The company is labor intensive importance of retail trade (180-83). The company enjoys major tax exemptions low tax base (183-86). The company is egalitarian lower income gap and more integration (186-87). The company is hierarchical, a “total” institution

intolerance (187-89). The company has high labor turnover rootlessness, social problems (189-91). The company employs mostly young males sex industry, support institutions for young families (191-93). Fort Bragg’s impact on the community economically (193-94). Environmental impact (194-201). Three Fayettevilles: wealthy, poor, and socialized (201-03). County’s development detached from city’s (204-06). Urban problems: crime, drugs, prostitution, domestic violence (206-09). Ambivalence deriving from dependence (209-13).

Ch. 6: Military Restructuring, Civilian Camouflage, and Hot Peace (1989-2000). Post-Cold War victory of “war itself,” with “elite political agreement” to cultivate “fear” to justify the view “that the American state must remain large and strong in the military fact it showed the world” (215). Cultural ideology of “evolutionism” to justify “nuclear orientalism” (215-16). Lack of place names shows half-hearted embrace of official Cold War narrative (216-17). Restructuring the military for a Hot Peace: downsized, outsourced, privatized; for soldiers, more onerous but less dangerous; favors Fort Bragg (217-27). Complex, developing identities of military and civilian, and the tensions between them (227-39). “People define the kind of society they want when they characterize soldiers and civilians.” (231). “The military” as a pernicious myth (Richard Kohn) (233-34). Dec. 1995: “racist skinhead” murder by white supremacist Fort Bragg soldier James Burmeister (239-45). Military’s heightened public stature and the consequences of this, threatening to push the civilian “outside the nation” (245-46). All-American Week celebrations: “spectator-sport militarism” (Michael Mann) (246-50). Fort Bragg’s Psychological Operations shapes military PR (250-51). But civilian-military distinction has “worn

down” rather than “intensified” (252). Negative indictment of effects of war and war preparedness on Fayetteville: they have “wreaked havoc on soldiers’ bodies and psyches, cost people their sons and daughters, lowered the wages and raised the taxes of most, intensified social inequalities, and yoked the progress of their democracy and egalitarian hopes to war’s secrecies, redefined citizenship, and political and racial hatreds” (253).

Epilogue. Grand opening of the Airborne and Special Operations Museum (254-57). “Costly work of euphemism, erasure, and financing” that does not make invisible “a different route to safety and service” (257).

Notes. 47 pages. Of interest: David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980); Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (1991); John Whiteclay Chambers III, To Raise an

Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (1987); Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949-51 (1994); Sidney Lens, Permanent War: The Militarization of America (1987); Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (1992); A.J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U.S. Army between Korea and Vietnam (1986); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (1995); Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998); Simon Sheppard, “Foot Soldiers of the New World Order: The Rise of the Corporate Military,” New Left Review 228 (1998): 128-38; Mary Kaldor and Basker Vashee, eds., Restructuring the Global Military Sector: Vol. 1: New Wars (1997); Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (1997); James Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994).

Acknowledgments.