The Eisenhower administration helped arm America to the teeth. Who knew?
Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America by Andrew C. McKevitt. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. 336 pp., $24.95 (paperback)
Historians are finally starting to shrug off the chilling effect the public takedown of Michael A. Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, originally published in 2000, had on the historical study of firearms in North America.
For those unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding Arming America, Bellesiles claimed that very few colonists owned working firearms. Once the NRA and other critics took aim, activists and scholars discovered that “the number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles’ work are extraordinary.” Ultimately, Columbia University rescinded the 2001 Bancroft Prize—one of the most coveted awards in American history—that it had originally bestowed upon Arming America. Following an extensive investigation by Emory University, Bellesiles resigned his position there as Professor of History at the end of 2002.
Fast-forward two decades. What began as a trickle in 2016 with the publication of Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America and David Silverman’s Thundersticks, is now a full-on rushing river of histories on the social and cultural dynamics of firearms in America. A similar uptick in popular histories of firearms includes Jim Rasenberger’s biography of Sam Colt, Revolver, Nathan Gorenstein’s biography of John Browning, The Guns of John Moses Browning, and John Bainbridge Jr.’s Gun Barons.
Andrew McKevitt’s Gun Country is the latest in this new wave. To better understand how America’s current love affair with firearms—and visceral aversion to gun regulation—emerged, McKevitt points to the World War II armament industry and the question of what to do with the incredible surplus of guns at the war’s conclusion.
The statistics are mindboggling. While the country’s population only increased by just under two and half times since WWII, the number of guns multiplied tenfold from an estimated 45 million in 1945 to 450 million in 2020—with the caveat that counting firearms in the U.S. is notoriously difficult, and not nearly as precise as one might wish.
The emergence of a mass consumer economy in the post-war period is well documented, and Gun Country fits well within this story. McKevitt argues that the Cold War and post-World War II consumer capitalism were the key “structures that made the gun country what it was by the 1990s,” creating the context for proponents and limiting the options for critics. So, for McKevitt, the key decades for the gun bloat are the 1950s and the 1960s—not the 1990s, nor the 1790s or the 1890s, for that matter. Consequently, he turns conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that “the Second Amendment did not produce the unparalleled U.S. gun market; on the contrary, the largely unregulated and singular gun market generated a new influential interpretation of the Second Amendment that persists today.”
McKevitt creatively dubs his interpretation the “Cold War Second Amendment” to describe the concept that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to self-defense and as a guard against tyranny—framed in contrast to the authoritarian state of the Soviet Union, where citizens had no such rights. Business was also booming in the Cold War because “guns are not like washing machines.” While people typically do not collect or own more than one washing machine at a time, evidence demonstrates that gun consumption is serial in nature. Those who buy guns often cannot help but want more—the essence of modern mass consumption.
Particularly disturbing is McKevitt’s discovery that the Eisenhower administration, faced with storehouses full of cheap European firearms flooding the U.S. market, decided that dumping them in the U.S. was preferable to the possibility they would fall into the hands of communist insurgents around the world. The State Department’s belief that importing surplus military-grade firearms from Europe would make Americans safer strikes me as tragically ironic, considering the unrivaled level of gun violence we face daily in the U.S., compared with all other wealthy, developed nations.
As hard as this analysis is to stomach, it serves as a reminder of just how acutely the fear of communism gripped many Americans in the 1950s. Deepening the irony is the reality that one of the loudest voices against the mass importation of cheap, surplus battlefield weapons was America’s domestic firearm industry. Fearing competition, it unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to take regulatory action. Tragically, one of these very surplus battlefield weapons was used to murder the thirty-fifth President of the United States. It seems Malcom X was righter than he knew when he made his controversial pronouncement about “chickens coming home to roost.”
McKevitt might have engaged more fully the intersection of religion and firearms. For example, he begins with a gripping tale of a famous homicide in 1992, when a Louisiana homeowner killed a Japanese high school exchange student. In passing, McKevitt mentions that soon after the fatal shot was fired the homeowner’s wife was “speaking in tongues, praying for salvation, or perhaps for forgiveness.” While McKevitt understandably focuses on the role racism played in the case, detailing the shooter’s connections to white supremacy, he ignores the implied connections to Pentecostalism. There are other tantalizing religious tidbits left unexplored, such as references to the United Methodist Church’s National Council to Ban Handguns and a Pentecostal church turned into an assembly plant for cheap handguns. Chapter eight investigates grassroots gun rights groups who were to the right of the National Rifle Association, and some referenced “God” and “gospel Christianity.” These examples collectively underscore the degree to which the story of faith and firearms is a gaping hole in the field of U.S. History—something that has driven me to create a course to better understand the subject and launched my current research project.
Gun Country is accessible, informative, and should appeal to readers of any background. Its arguments should give conservative Christians who celebrate free market capitalism and the right to firearms reason for pause. My favorite line and the nugget of encouragement I took away from McKevitt’s wonderful work is a statement that would work well as the final sentence of the book: “[T]he gun country is not natural and immutable; it had to be made, and it could be unmade.” Understanding how our current gun country came to be is the first step.
Joseph P. Slaughter is Assistant Professor of History and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Columbia University Press, 2023).
I have not (yet) picked this book up but I will. But only reacting to this write-up (i.e., I don’t know if the book author covers this already), but what the Eisenhower administration did in the 1950s was already old hat. In the late 1880s/early 1890s the US Army ran a very competitive RFP-like process to adopt the first breech-loading smokeless powder round service rifle, and the winner was a Norwegian design, the Krag-Jorgensen. The army stocked up on Krags over the 1890s but in heated combat in Cuba in 1898 in the Spanish-American War the Krag proved the inferior of the enemy’s Mausers. The US immediately set out to design a new firearm and when that gun entered service in large enough numbers — the 1903 Springfield — the Army essentially dumped all those Krags into the civilian population over the following decades via an iniitiative that was decades old but which bore fruit during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP: https://thecmp.org/about/). In this way, millions of American hunters adopted and “sporterized” cheap Krags for deer and large game hunting over the 1920s-40s.
This pattern repeated after World War I. During that war the combatant countries struggled to make machine guns portable, with the French being the first with their Chauchat and the US only very belatedly catching up with the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and Thompson submachine gun — the iconic Tommy gun. But these new fully automatic guns ate ammunition at unsustainable rates (from a supply perspective) so the US went about developing a middle-ground semi-automatic firearm in the 1930s, what would become the M-1 Garand, the rifle most US military personnel in World War II carried. But that meant the Army and navy both had lots of old 1903 Springfields that were no longer needed, and they too were sold to civilians through the CMP.
For the foreign military surplus that the Eisenhower administration let flow into this program, keep in mind that these were all single-shot, bolt-action rifles with a clip/magazine capacity usually between 5-8 rounds. German/Czech/Yugoslav/Spanish/Czechoslovak Mausers, Italian/Finnish Carcanos, British Lee Enfields (usually No 3s or 4s), Japanese Arisakas, later some Soviet Mosin Nagants, etc. The M-1 Garand was a technological leap way ahead of these bolt action rifles so that by the 1950s, all of these were obsolete (though for budgetary reasons, many remained in military use around the world for decades to come in poorer countries). But again, while military rifles, in terms of technology there was very little difference between them and standard civilian hunting rifles available at Sears at the time. In fact, some of the higher-end hunting rifles would have been better quality. The Krag-Jorgensen and 1903 Springfield (and its cousin, the Model of 1917) were all similarly bolt action rifles with 8 round capacity built-in magazines (loaded with stripper clips for speed). What the vast majority of Americans did was buy these guns and modify them — “sporterize” them — to mimic the more expensive hunting or match competition civilian rifles they couldn’t afford. (This phenomenon of sporterizing military surplus firearms frustrates modern collectors, by the way, as it destroys any investment value.)
The CMP has only ever sold one semi-automatic military surplus rifle: the M-1 Garand which the US began phasing out in the late 1950s, and it still sells them today including historic ones refurbished. However, the Garand is a heavy, wood-stock rifle with a total capacity clip of 8 rounds. It also shoots a big, heavy round (the .30-06) which not everybody is comfortable shooting; lots of recoil. Its descendant (the M-14) was replaced by the lighter and smaller caliber AR series firearms in the middle of the Vietnam War, iterations of which the US still uses today. Oddly, I do not know of a single mass shooting event in which the shooter used an M-1. Too heavy, too clunky, kinda scary-powerful, and only 8 rounds. (And reloading it could be done quickly but it required a certain technique — a skill one had to develop.) It was an amazing technology in 1941, not so much in 2024 compared to modern ARs.
This is all to say that I really don’t see the Eisenhower administration’s actions as unique or unusual, including in terms of volume, by the 1950s. The infrastructure for distributing (selling) military surplus in the US already existed and a large part of the (then, more rural) American population was used to dealing with it, both the CMP and other channels. (Many department stores bought up Eisenhower’s foreign surplus guns and would sell them in their showrooms or in parking lot sales. Remember that they saw these guns as competition to their existing civilian hunting and match gun inventory.) Also keep in mind that while technically illegal, many GIs from both World Wars brought home their own souvenirs, including enemy guns. There is the reality that the two World Wars flooded the world with guns and also trained millions of civilians (through conscription) in how to use them, but my personal experience has been gthat average Americans didn’t see themselves as buying military hardware so much as getting access to cheap, modifiable hunting and range guns.