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Ike's Monument: Every Gun Is a Theft

2014; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1096/fj.14-0601ufm

1530-6860

Gerald Weissmann,

Suicide and Self-Harm Studies

Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of Columbia University on the front cover of Life magazine, April 17, 1950 (litho), American School (20th century)/private collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, inspects art treasures looted by the Germans and stored away in the Merkers salt mine. Image courtesy U.S. National Archives. Every gun that is made … signifies, in the final sense, a theft from … the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 (1) In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex …. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 (2) If there weren't so many of these [handguns] around, why, maybe you could be a little more peaceful. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1958 (3) On President's Day 2014, our 34th president made a grand comeback. Between breaks in the Sochi Olympics, the little screen featured upbeat car commercials urging us to “celebrate Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway system” (4). On the big screen, Eisenhower's role in saving the art treasures of Europe from Nazi plunder was celebrated in “The Monuments Men” (5). Not to be outdone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution displayed documents and works of art honoring Eisenhower as “soldier, diplomat and statesman, through whose wisdom and foresight irreplaceable art treasures were saved for future generations” (6). With all that attendant publicity, “The Monuments Men” posted the fourth-highest box-office results of the holiday, trailing “The Lego Movie”, “About Last Night”, and “RoboCop” (7). Movie critic Mick LaSalle commented, “President Eisenhower might have liked ‘RoboCop,‘ because its villain is the same as his—the military-industrial complex” (8). Ike targeted other villains as well, including Joe McCarthy and his gang of rabid anticommunists. Ike came to mind with today's news that a gun-toting “rocker”—also a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association—accused President Obama of being a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel” (9). Ike had cautioned the class of 1950 at Columbia College, “Let's not be stupid enough to call anybody a Communist who may be just a little bit brighter than ourselves” (10). When Eisenhower was first elected, in 1952, Senator McCarthy was riding high. Two years later, after the Army-McCarthy hearings, which Ike quarterbacked, the president could quip: “It's no longer McCarthyism. It's McCarthywasm” (11). As he said in another context, “People ask how it happened—by God, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that” (12). And then there was that “every gun is a theft” warning…. Six months after his inauguration in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept his election pledge by ending the Korean War. He had argued against any such land war in Asia: “This world in arms is not spending money alone”, he explained. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than 30 cities … it is two fine, fully equipped hospitals” (1). Not only bricks and mortar were at stake: the Korean War had taken 54,246 American lives and cost $320 billion of today's dollars (13, 14). Ike would have appreciated a recent report from Brown University's “Eisenhower Research Project”—a name chosen to honor Ike's warning against a burgeoning “military industrial complex” in the United States. The Brownies reported that in the first decade after 9/11, our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan had killed at least 225,000 people overall, with over 6000 U.S. military deaths (15). Those wars have cost the United States between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans. We ain't talking brick schools! But, it's not only guns abroad that kill Americans and rob us of our treasure. If Ike were around today to warn us against the nonmilitary-industrial complex: deaths and injuries due to gun violence have been estimated to cost our economy $40 billion per annum. Meanwhile, ammunition manufacturers will make a projected $993 million in profits on sales of $11.7 billion in 2013 (16). That's over $400 billion for the decade on sales of $10 trillion and at a cost of 320,000 lives (32,000/year; Table 1). Every gun is a theft: there have been more deaths from gun violence in the United States since 9/11 than all civilian and military deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Persia combined. This sort of violence, unique to the United States, constitutes a major public health hazard. In 1955, Ike honored Jonas Salk for sparing countless thousands of American parents from the “agonizing fears of the annual epidemic of poliomyelitis” (18). Children were mainly at risk. There had been 38,741 cases of polio with 1620 deaths in the previous year and an estimated death rate of one/100,000. The White House also established an Advisory Committee that was given broad executive power to assure a fair, nationwide distribution of vetted lots of the scarce vaccine (19). Well, these days, we have an annual epidemic of gun violence, with a death rate 10 times that of polio in 1954 and with 20-fold more people killed each year. But, in terms of public health, we are still at the pre-Salk level when it comes to gunshot violence. We know what causes the disease (bullets), we know the vector (guns, rifles, assault weapons, etc.), and we know where in the body the injuries lodge (watch any episode of NCIS). We actually know more about this condition than we know about similar threats, such as cancer of the prostate or leukemia (Table 1). We also know some of the social factors involved. In the United States, children are at risk: think Columbine and Sandy Hook. The death rate of blacks in the United States from firearms violence is twice that of the general population, with black youngsters from ages 15 to 24 particularly susceptible. Britain has a death rate from gun violence of 0.23; in the Bahamas, it's 22.2 (20). If one compares two cities, similar with respect to populations and overall crime—Seattle and Vancouver—the Washingtonians were 4.8 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than their neighbors to the north. The Canadians have strict handgun control laws (21). We also have a few clues to what might blunt the epidemic here in the United States: it's clear that the more gun dealers there are in any city, the more firearm deaths are recorded (22). It's also well documented that the more rigorous firearm laws are in any given state, the lower the rate of firearm fatalities (23). Conclusion: stay away from places with lots of guns, lots of gun dealers, and weak gun-control laws. Avoid gun-toting rocker/NRA bullies who call our president a mongrel. But that advice is on a par with 1954 public health warnings to avoid E. coli-infested swimming pools during a polio epidemic. Even before his “military-industrial” aperçu, Ike had a solid history of spotting bullies in the act of plunder. On May 26, 1944, 11 days before D-day, General of the Armies Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an unusual proclamation. Hoping to avoid the destruction of cultural heirlooms in the battle for Hitler's Festung Europa, Ike gave his troops a clear command. Ike told them: “Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible” (24). Eisenhower's command was widely respected; it also served as the marching order for the Monuments Men. Ike and his crew of GI monument wardens knew that they were dealing with art-hoarding Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and that amateur dauber, Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. Therefore, as American and Allied troops fought their way from the Channel beaches to the doors of Berlin, they paid attention not only to monuments but also to portable treasures filched from occupied countries and Germany's own citizens. Thanks to that D-Day order and to the devotion and service of the Monuments Men, thousands of treasures were saved from destruction. On April 2, 1946—less than 1 year after war ended in Europe—General Eisenhower was honored at a gala reception hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One of the Met's own Monument Men, Director James Rorimer (played by Matt Damon in the movie), greeted his commander as Ike was hailed for his “oversight of the repatriation of artworks stolen by the Nazis during World War II”. Eleven of these works of art are now in the collection of the Met, given by families whose treasures had been saved; a tour of the lot is on-line today (6). Ike told the audience in 1946 what the Monuments Men had unearthed the year before: “There, in caves, in mines, and in isolated mountain hideouts, we found that Hitler and his gang, with unerring instinct for enriching themselves, had stored art treasures filched from their rightful owners throughout conquered Europe. Alongside bar and minted gold were found paintings, statues, tapestries, jewelry, and all else that the Nazis knew mankind would pay much to rescue and to preserve” (25). The moment is captured in that photo in the National Archives (above), which shows General Eisenhower at a salt mine near Merkers in the company of Generals Omar Bradley and “Blood and Guts” George Patton. At the Met, he was in different company. Ike would serve the museum as trustee (1948–1953) and honorary trustee (1953–1969). His fellow trustees included Thomas B. Watson of IBM and Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, both also trustees of Columbia University. They saw in Eisenhower a future president of their university, perhaps of the United States (25). Ike, who had begun to dally with amateur oil painting, made reference in his museum talk to a fellow artist Bill Mauldin, the stellar cartoonist of Stars and Stripes. Ike quipped, “Frequently the soldier was led to express in artistic fashion something of his own reactions to the phenomena of war. [Mr. Mauldin] spared no pains to show what he thought of us brass hats” (25). Mauldin had ridiculed the spit and polish regulations that General Patton imposed on his battle-weary troops. In return, old Blood and Guts had Mauldin hauled into his office for “sabotaging military discipline” and threatened “to throw his ass in jail”. As soon as he heard the news, Eisenhower overruled Patton's censure, issuing a directive that no commanders were to interfere with the Stars and Stripes, including Mauldin's cartoons (26)! Ike's stand on a free press was welcomed by the GIs, hailed by the press itself, and spread to a wider public in the postwar years. It confirmed Ike's reputation as a brass hat in touch with civil society: some saw it as a first step to higher office than military command. Overseas in 1942, Ike penned a short eulogy to his father, who had died back home in Abilene, Kansas. “His finest monument is his reputation”, Ike wrote in his diary, and he could have been describing himself (27). When Ike returned to the United States, his reputation had soared as leader of the men who swept the Nazis from Fortress Europa in the greatest battle ever. He'd juggled the demands of prima donna generals, like Montgomery and Patton, and thorny allies, such as de Gaulle; he had established interim civil regimes in the liberated countries and in partitioned Germany; he had exposed and cleaned up the concentration camps; he'd attended to monuments and returned stolen treasures. He was also a true humanist who spoke and wrote well: “They who have dwelt with death will be among the most ardent worshipers of life and beauty and of the peace in which these can thrive” (25). With a legion of fans behind him, with active support by Republican stalwarts, such as Watson and Sulzberger, and with progressive Democrats, like James Roosevelt, the “Draft Ike” movement began as early as 1948 and hit its stride in 1952 (28). After a brief stint as president of Columbia University—to establish his bona fides as a civilian leader—Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower swept the Electoral College, 442 to 89, to become our 34th president. Only the Dixiecrat states refused Ike their vote: in 1953, he paid them back. In Eisenhower's first State of the Union message, he proposed “… to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces” (29). He not only used that authority but followed it up with the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. And then, Ike went on to preside over the interstate highway system, the end of the Korean war, the startup of NASA, the first National Medal of Science and to push back against “so many handguns out there”. Finally, after two terms in Washington, Ike proudly reported that “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People ask how it happened—by God, it didn't just happen, I'll tell you that”. That's a monument and a reputation.