Lutz - Homefront (2001) - Synopsis

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). against black soldiers (64-66). August Introduction: Making War at Home. 1941 racial fighting; killing of Ned Overview: many of the effects of “war Turman, black private from South and war preparation” invisible; “we all Carolina (67-71). Small steps toward inhabit an army camp” (1-3). Fayetteville fairer treatment (71-75). Martha Duell, and its “bad reputation” described (3-7). French war bride, becomes town civic Six-year anthropological and historical leader (75-79). Demobilization; study concludes the “distinction between economic anxieties (79-83). WWII’s things civil and things military . . . has for “largely conservative” social effects (83decades been an illusion” (7-9). 84). Institution of the national security state (84-86). Ch. 1: Encampment: Boosters, Social Crisis, and a Military Solution (1918Ch. 3: Simulating War at Home: 1939). Fayetteville Chamber of Counterinsurgencies, Foreign and Commerce lands a military base, 1918 Domestic. Implications of the “nuclear (11-13). Native American history (13mode of warfare” (88-93). Local effects 14). Tuscarora War against Indians, early minimal (93-94). Growth of special th 18 c. (14). Arrival of Scots; American forces; typical exercises (94-99). Revolution (14). Foundation of Uncertain degrees of complicity among Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry local residents (99-102). “Pineland”: (FILI) in 1793, the 2nd oldest continuously Fayetteville re-imagined as territory of operating militia in U.S. (15, 17-18). Fort Bragg war games (102-05). Extent Race war dominant theme of local of land devoted to war preparation (105history, suppression of blacks’ advances 07). Impact on Fayetteville (107-08). (15-23). Acquisition of land in the Purposes of war games (108). Gaming as Sandhills area (ultimately, 161,000 acres) “dominant frame” (108-09). “The real (24-29). Construction of Camp Bragg, war facing America throughout the 1950s 1918 (29-33). “Preparedness was not about communism but, as for so movement” enlists militarization as way long, race” (109). The color line (110to “regenerate” American moral 12). Militarization subsumes other social character (33-36). In 1920s, peacetime conflicts (Michael Sherry) (112-13). Cold soldiers looked down upon (36-39). War’s imperatives and their impact on 1930s: appreciation in Depression of struggle over racial justice (113-15). steady income and relative sophistication Military’s hesitant contribution to racial of military, but strong antiwar sentiments progress (116-18). Paul Lewis (118-20). (39-43). Charles Easley (120-21). Demonstrations and sit-ins (122-24). Economic justice Ch. 2: Hostess to the “Good War” issues (124-25). City resolution against (1939-1947). Photo of civilian women Klan sign on main road to interstate, telephone operators (45-47). 1939 as 1967 (125-26). Gertha Gibson, day care shift to “national security” ethos (47-49). programs (126-28). Dr. Mason Quick, Eightfold expansion of army, 1939-1941 black doctor (128-29). Cold War led to (49). Fort Bragg expands (49-51). problem of race being “mistaken” for Reminiscences of the influx of soldiers problem of communism (130). (51-56). Sex & class barriers to dating (56-59). War-induced changes in division Ch. 4: Carnival, Carnage, and of labor (59-61). Racial discrimination 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 (16166). 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 (19742000). 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 (20406). Urban problems: crime, drugs, prostitution, domestic violence (206-09). Ambivalence deriving from dependence (209-13). Ch. 6: Military Restructuring, Civilian Camouflage, and Hot Peace (19892000). 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 (21727). 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.