There are so few, and this one has been around for so long!
We just converted an old friend of ours, and she’s watching Season 1. She writes to us that in Ladies Room, someone refers to the “military industrial complex.” That phrase was rather famously coined by Eisenhower in his farewell speech in 1961.
Any experts who can confirm or deny? Was the phrase in vernacular use before the speech?
29 Responses to “Can this be another anachronism?”
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Seems as though Eisenhower speechwriters are credited with coining the term. From Wikipedia:
"In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term military-industrial-congressional complex, and thus indicated the essential role that the United States Congress plays in the propagation of the military industry. But, it is said, that the president chose to strike the word congressional in order to placate members of the legislative branch of the federal government. The actual authors of the term were Eisenhower's speech-writers Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos."
So I vote 'anachronism', if only by a few months.
Big S, I link to Wikipedia above, so I was hoping for additional sources.
Sourcewatch also gives Eisenhower (or his speechwriters) credit for the phrase. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Milita…
So I'd vote "anachronism." But I'll forgive them, since the phrase still makes so much sense that you think it should have been around forever.
(The show doesn't inspire much nostalgia for me; I remember those days. But they sure had some good Republicans around back then.)
New York Times, Jan. 22, 1961: Former President Eisenhower, in his televised farewell address this week, called attention to a problem that appears to have bothered him for many years — "the acquisition of unwarranted influences, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
Here's the Eisenhowr speech (see Par 4, 5th sentence): http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/…
Yep, I knew about the speech, and I assumed it was a coinage. Unless someone drops an earlier citation here in comments, it's a bona fide anachronism.
Excuse me, both terms "military-industrial complex" and Military-industrial-congressional complex" were in very common use in Southern California, especially within the aviation and defense industries, prior to 1959.
Wikipedia and Bill Moyers did not get this correct. At that time I was an executive with a major movie studio in Burbank, CA which also made films for the aviation and defense industry.
Would Ike's Jan 1961 speech be the first time a familiar turn of phrase was re-used in politics? It well could be East Coast reporters were not familiar with the terms.
FWIW – Bill Moyers confirms: “It was an ex-soldier who first put forward the notion of a military-industrial complex. In January 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a warning about this symbiotic relationship between government defense spending and the economy in his farewell address to the nation…”
Check out Eugene Jarecki's excellent 2005 documentary, "Why We Fight".
According to an interview with the director: "For the film we interviewed the son of Dwight Eisenhower, John Eisenhower, who’s a military scholar and a historian and Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan. They do reveal the word “congressional†had been in the warning [it would be dropped by the final draft] because Eisenhower was keenly aware of the crucial role played by congress in making it possible for the unholy alliance between the military and industry to have the kind of impact on our policy making that he feared it would have."
- link to interview … http://www.indiewire.com/article/eugene_jarecki_p…
As for when the exact phrase was coined, I'm not sure that it was used prior to Ike's "farewell address" on January 19, 1961, but the notion of such an entity certainly existed before that.
- you can watch the film, here … http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=921985882…
The origins of the phrase in question is addressed in a 1972 oral history interview with Eisenhower speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, who is credited with coining the term.
http://eisenhower.archives.gov/Research/Oral_Hist…
When I was in high school in Cleveland from 85-89, the term was used a lot, that's how I remember it. It was taught to us in World History.
This item, from http://www.americanforeignrelations.com suggests that the notion of a "military-industrial complex" was on Eisenhower's mind, as far back as 1953.
"Eisenhower shared the concern about the economic cost of maintaining large armaments. In an address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 16 April 1953, he had called for control and reduction of armaments. He said that if an unchecked armaments race continued, "the best that could be expected" would be:
'a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the people of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms …is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people….
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.'"
- link to item … http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/The-M…
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."
Sun Tzu
John A. Hobson wrote in his 1902 book, 'Imperialism: A Study,':
“Our economic analysis has disclosed the fact that it is only the interests of competing cliques of business men – investors, contractors, export manufacturers, and certain professional classes – that are antagonistic; that these cliques, usurping the authority and voice of the people, use the public resources to push their private interests, and spend the blood and money of the people in this vast and disastrous military game, feigning national antagonism which have no basis in reality.â€
- see pg. 134, here … http://books.google.com/books?id=bl0k_ZjcWZ8C&…
C Carroll Adams: Is there any documentation of these earlier uses of the phrase?
You'd be doing etymologists a big favor!
i am probably wrong about this, but i always thought c. wright mills coined the phrase in his 1956 book 'the power elite.' certainly the book covers this concept. so maybe ike's speechwriter at least was influenced by mills.
Meh, writers and other famous folk. Always claiming to have coined a phrase. Are we really supposed to believe that no one said “to be or not to be” before Shakespeare? He certainly had the means and method to document it, but that doesn’t mean no one else ever uttered the term before then. In two or three hundred years, Paris Hilton will receive credit for “That’s hot.”
“War is a racket” by Major General Smedley Butler. It may not actually make use of the term, but it certainly puts forth the idea of the MIC.
It is not impossible for someone to have uttered that phrase in 1960, even if unlikely. He did not refer to a speech that was given in 1961 when he uttered it. He likes to read and write, you know. Give him the benefit of a doubt.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest usage of “military-industrial complex” as 1953, quoting from an article in the journal Military Affairs:
“Shreveport was the heart of a military-industrial complex that extended west to Marshall, Texas, and northwest to Jefferson, Texas.”
(Citation: Moore, Waldo W. “The Defense of Shreveport–The Confederacy’s Last Redoubt.” Military Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1953), pp. 72-82.
mm2, that really doesn't work as the usage is for an actual complex, not a concept of business and militaristic intents having crossover.
It is definitely an anachronism, whether it was actually coined before 1961 or not, because even if it was there is absolutely no chance at all that Ken Cosgrove would have heard or used it except in the wake of Eisenhower’s speech.
Just quoting OED – not saying it's the definitive answer!
Cool! It looks like Ike did get the phrase into "vernacular use."
But somebody who had read widely could have encountered the phrase before then. Who used it in the show?
not_B, I don't remember who said it. My friend emailed me. I haven't seen that episode since S3 began.
Hi all,
A quick look at Google Books shows the phrase was quite popular before 1960, including at least one reference from 1937.
http://books.google.com/books?as_q=&num=10&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=military+industrial+complex&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_brr=0&as_pt=ALLTYPES&lr=&as_vt=&as_auth=&as_pub=&as_sub=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=1900&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=1959&as_isbn=&as_issn=
MadMom, THANKS. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
#19 fnarf – might not you be arbitrarily selling the worldly Cos short?
Sorry for the delay. I just saw that in the meantime MadMom provided a Google link. The top reference from 1947 was the one I intended to provide.
Perhaps the term was not as common outside the aviation industry. Still military aircraft were being built on the East Coast long before January 1961, so I am shocked people assumed Ike or his speech writers coined “military-industrial complex.”
This is military industrial complex related-
I’ve just been informed of the Mad Men anachronism regarding the fallout shelter sign at the hospital in Season one’s “Long Weekend”:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1304744&id=17563518117
I was just wondering if Basket of Kisses, the Mad Men Blog of Record, already cover this? I’m not so good at doing the site searches.