Palo Alto, page 30
Manufacturers increased prices to offset the high wages that constituted their side of the compact, which made life hard for Americans whose pay wasn’t tied to industrial revenues. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the dynamic, “A passenger in even a very fast automobile is reasonably certain of keeping up with it. A man running alongside is not so well situated.”38 Suburban military Keynesianism was a speedy car, and not everyone was along for the ride. The program left workers behind in new ways. For example, the unionized fruit industry, with its relatively high pay, had been open to undocumented immigrants, but only U.S. citizens were generally eligible for defense work. Still, Northern California’s Mexican population boomed as workers came from every direction toward the new center of prosperity, many solicited by regional labor contractors looking to fill jobs in the fields.vii In 1948, the Supreme Court struck down restrictive real estate covenants, allowing documented Mexican workers to live anywhere they wanted, but the Supreme Court couldn’t make high-technology firms hire them, even for nondefense work. Meanwhile, mechanization changed food production in California: The state’s agricultural workforce declined (in absolute terms) by over 20 percent between 1949 and 1969, though workers harvested virtually the same amount of acreage.viii Braceros, Mexican-Americans, and undocumented Mexican immigrants, cordoned away and together on the segregated labor market, all vied for the same shrinking set of jobs.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved out of rural areas in the southern states to seek industrial jobs, and a solid portion came west. San Francisco’s black population quadrupled between 1940 and 1945, from 4,800 to 20,000, filling neighborhoods without racial covenants, such as the Western Addition and its Fillmore district in San Francisco.39, 40 In the East Bay, defense wages spun up vibrant black communities like the one depicted in Marlon Riggs’s 1981 documentary, Long Train Running: A History of the Oakland Blues. The Oklahoma-born blues guitarist Lowell Fulson tells Riggs of playing packed Bay Area clubs during the war days, how he could hardly pull off his hat to the crowd before it was full of money. Downtown Oakland “became packed with a bustling twenty-four-hour street scene,” writes scholar Chris Rhomberg. “Theaters and cafes stayed open all night to accommodate the swing shift, and dance halls, taverns, and other amusements sprang up to appeal to war workers with disposable income.”41 But as shipbuilding declined with the end of the war, black workers were among the first fired: Manufacturing employment in Oakland fell by 70 percent between August of 1945 and February of 1946.ix42
Like the white space settlers, these black Okies were younger and better educated than most people in the communities they’d left, and when the shipbuilding industry in San Francisco and the East Bay could no longer absorb them, thousands tried their luck in the South Bay. The black population in Santa Clara Valley more than doubled every decade between 1940 and 1980, jumping from 730 in 1940 to 4,187 in 1960, mostly in the growing black communities in San Jose and in and around Palo Alto.x But despite their manufacturing qualifications, black workers struggled to get hired in industrial jobs and often had to settle for janitorial positions. The historian Herbert G. Ruffin concludes that, contrary to the prevailing Great Migration narrative, wartime experience, trade unions, and federal anti-discrimination rules weren’t enough to secure a significant role for black workers in South Bay manufacturing.43
Rearmament as a global economic stimulus program made perfect sense to a few policy makers, but what the country really needed was an expensive new shooting war, and American presidents have never had much trouble finding one of those. In a conversation about the eventual success of the NSC 68 rearmament plan at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, someone in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 seminar reflecting on the Truman era posed the idea: “Korea came along and (saved?) us—did the job for us.” Guest and NSC 68 architect Dean Acheson conceded, “I think you can say that.”xi
Too Much Progress in the Burial Industry
Talking about the American early 1950s as a postwar period is misleading because there was a war. The plan that became suburban military Keynesianism sounded wacky to Truman, but the Chinese Communist Revolution and Soviet nuclear testing (along with an intensification of dogmatic American anticommunism) did suggest an inexorable drift toward round III. In 1945, the Soviets and Americans bisected Korea at the 38th parallel, creating North Korea and South Korea, and when North Korean troops blew by the line in June of 1950, American policy makers saw East Asia crumbling before their eyes: Red dominoes falling from Maoist China all the way down to Australia and Indonesia, where the popular Indonesian Communist Party threatened to take power by election or insurgency.xii A U.S.-U.N. invasion force of 13,000, led by General Douglas MacArthur (the same one who burned down the Bonus Army camp for Hoover), pushed up the Korean peninsula toward the Chinese border. Mao responded with 400,000 volunteers, who promptly captured 7,000 American prisoners and drove the invaders back south. After Stalin’s death, in 1953, an armistice reset the border.44
A draw between the great powers in military terms, the war was a disaster for the Korean and Chinese peoples. American strategic bombing had proved itself in Japan under Shockley’s team of actuaries, and MacArthur began the war with a massive attack on North Korean cities and infrastructure. A RAND Corporation report describes the bombing campaign as “leisurely” because of the lack of enemy air defenses, and in less than two months American forces destroyed almost all their strategic targets. One crew was apparently so well armed that they chased a single enemy soldier on his motorcycle, dropping bombs until they hit him.45 U.S. air forces dropped 635,000 tons of explosives during the three years of the war, more than the total used in the World War II Pacific theater, including over 30,000 tons of napalm.46 An estimated 400,000 to one million Chinese soldiers died, and according to the head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, so did one-fifth of the North Korean population.47 The United States lost fewer than 35,000 men, inaugurating the new epoch of American lethal efficiency.
The Korean War was the global underside of military Keynesianism. As bombers leveled North Korea’s cities between 1950 and ’52, military support for electronics research at Stanford tripled.48 Stanford’s leadership was wary of World War II—Hoover’s preference had been to let Hitler and Stalin wipe each other out—but fighting communists was a different matter, and MacArthur himself remained a proud Hooverite, scheming with the ex-president against Truman while still in uniform.xiii The DOD’s 1951 budget nearly quintupled, from $13 billion to $58 billion, and some universities became, in the words of C. Wright Mills, “financial branches of the military establishment.”49 Whereas only a few years before, William Talbot got kicked out of SRI for his profligate government contracting, Stanford’s post-Tresidder president J. E. Wallace Sterling (“sufficiently anticommunist and anti-Roosevelt to please Hoover,” writes historian Rebecca Lowen) promoted Fred Terman to provost in 1954, urging him to remake the rest of the university the way he remade engineering.50 Terman had won another war, and with a Republican (Eisenhower) finally back in the White House, Stanford was no longer afraid of the state.
“[T]he solution to the economic crisis of the end of the war turned out to be simply not letting the war end,” writes historian Walter Johnson.51 The Cold War was a real, long war, and millions of people died. To speak of the American “postwar” economy or state into the 1950s is not to talk about a country at peace, but a country finished with peace altogether, a nation that has embraced a permanent conflict. “The world is squarely faced with Asiatic versus Western civilization,” Hoover wrote MacArthur in his 1946 “John the Baptist” letter, in which he compared the general to the biblical preacher and urged him to start giving political speeches. “Western civilization cannot stand the shock of either Communism dominating the world or of another world war. Strength by the United States in preparedness and sense and courage in diplomatic action can prevent both.”xiv Yet there were some diplomatic problems in a Shockley-Arnold preparedness strategy based on flooding the world with weapons. An Eisenhower plan to sell discount nuclear-tipped intermediate-range ballistic missiles to NATO allies in Europe (standard military Keynesianism) helped precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis five years later, when the first-strike nukes showed up in Turkey, on the Soviet doorstep.xv But missiles kept the suburbs growing and the Reds everywhere in check. And when they didn’t, that’s what 30,000 tons of napalm were for.
The conventional American narrative about the Korean War, to the degree that we bother to tell one, is about a country and a global order brought together. The United Nations, led by America, would now intervene to protect existing borders from communist aggression. Truman racially integrated the military, and the reimposition of price controls slowed down the runaway car of American prosperity so more people could jump in. America came together, even if we had to kill a couple of million East Asian people to do it. But the war had a domestic front, too. At the federal and state levels, the Red Scare kicked back into gear. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 passed in the name of anticommunism over Truman’s veto, reaffirming the 1924 country quota system and making anarchists and communists automatically deportable.52 Radicals (particularly black radicals) found themselves surveilled, arrested, and, when possible under the new law, deported.53 Even the military integration wasn’t going as planned: Mass murder was not a strong basis for interracial harmony, and white American troops in Korea greeted their new black bunkmates with Confederate flags.54 At Stanford, President Sterling announced that communists were not welcome to teach, and he began collaborating with the California Un-American Activities Committee. Sterling also worked with the campus Hoover clique to monitor and remove left-wing faculty.55
In the 1950s and early 1960s, no Stanford professor received more anticommunist pressure than economist Paul A. Baran.xvi When he was hired, in 1948, Baran was a great choice for a university that wanted a patriotic lefty econ professor. He was a Russian Jew by birth; his father was a Menshivik rather than a Bolshevik, and Paul finished his studies in Berlin. There he was taken under the wing of Rudolf Hilferding, leading light of the interwar German leftist economists and author of the magisterial Finance Capital—recall his early analysis of the railroads. When the left lost the struggle with Hitler, Baran fled, eventually to Harvard. Exceptionally brilliant, he found no shortage of American demand for his capabilities when World War II came. He worked in the Office of Price Administration, in R & D for the OSS, and for the Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany and then Japan. After the war he worked for the Department of Commerce and then the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was also an engaging lecturer, and he knew something about the emerging Soviet bloc. Though he didn’t keep his socialistic tendencies secret, that wasn’t a total deal breaker at the time—no member of the Communist Party, he wasn’t even welcome in the USSR after helping the United States gather intelligence in reconstructing Germany. Stanford quickly promoted him to full professor and gave him tenure. That was a mistake.
Baran was a professional peer and (at least) an intellectual equal of the leading liberal economists. During the war, he worked alongside Galbraith, who called him “one of the most brilliant, and by a wide margin, the most interesting economist I have ever known.”56 But whereas others were eager to ride bombs Strangelove-style into the prosperous American half of the century, Baran loathed military Keynesianism. In fact, he thought its development discredited Keynesianism in a broader sense. Along with his Harvard friend Paul Sweezy, Baran became the strategy’s most incisive critic within mainstream economics. In his 1957 book, The Political Economy of Growth, he argued that it did matter where demand was coming from, that stockpiling weapons of mass destruction for the spending stimulus was “very much akin to the counsel to burn the house in order to roast the pig.”57 The oligopolies running the American economy followed the government down absurd R & D paths, failing to produce anything useful for the people. And on their own, corporate leaders only pursued investment that reduced their costs, avoiding plans to expand output, which (as we’ve seen) ignited price competition and lessened profits. For workers, living didn’t get increasingly easy, as the Keynesians predicted. Under capitalism, people couldn’t direct the nation’s societal surplus to useful ends. Rather, the people’s inability to control those resources in the face of oligopolistic control defined capitalism.
Baran’s conclusions—representing the left wing of the left critique of left-Keynesianism—were controversial, but what really got him in trouble was Cuba. Part of his argument in The Political Economy of Growth is that America was unwilling and economically unable to tolerate any sort of popular sovereignty in what he called the “source countries.”58 It was the same conclusion Ernesto Galarza came to in Bolivia. No matter what type of government they pursued, Third World countries that sought meaningful independence had to expropriate foreign capitalists. Country by country, America put its fat finger on the scale in the 1950s, actively interfering in internal politics; Baran lists Venezuela, British Guiana, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, Indochina, Iran, Egypt, and Argentina. Third World revolution suggested a new path to Baran, beyond American-Russian militarism. He visited Cuba at Fidel Castro’s invitation in the fall of 1960, and he returned to Stanford after three weeks to report. Attendance at his public lecture overflowed. Baran praised Castro and warned that America would soon seek to halt Cuba’s progress with a coup attempt similar to the one that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, in the interests of expropriated fruit companies, but he added that such a coup wasn’t likely to succeed in Cuba.xvii A wire service picked up the story and it went national: Stanford had a commie economics professor, with tenure.
As long as he wasn’t pro-Soviet, it was easy enough for most of the 1950s to write off Baran’s professed Marxism as an intellectual orientation with no urgent political relevance. His Harvard degree, professional esteem, and long résumé of American public service insulated him.xviii But paying a teacher to shill for Castro in front of a giant crowd was too much for Stanford’s conservative elements. Letters from alumni donors poured in. A Texaco executive reminded Sterling about the company’s $10,000 donation from the previous year as well as the Castro regime’s confiscation of $50 million in Texaco property. If the school wanted more donations, it should do something about “a professor who glories [sic] a sworn enemy of the United States and a robber of one of the University’s benefactors.”59 For capitalists, the global class war was always personal. Sterling held a lunch meeting with large donors, including a top executive from Transamerica Corporation, which is what Bank of America was then calling itself. University trustee and West Coast corporate leader David Packard prepared a letter for the pro-Baran Stanford Daily suggesting that the professor’s salary be reduced by a dollar for every dollar he received from the communists. Too inflammatory, it went unsent, but it reflected the attitude of the Stanford board. The alumni outpouring was public anyway, and the Daily ran a five-part series exposing conservative donor influence and defending Baran. Provost Frederick Terman warned that they couldn’t fire the tenured professor for mere disagreeable scholarship without ruining the school’s reputation, something everyone involved valued very much. Instead, they bullied him until he died.
A heart attack took Baran’s life in 1964 at the young age of fifty-four. He never got to see his masterwork, Monopoly Capital, written with Sweezy, published. Earlier that year, he complained to his writing partner, “For next year I got a teaching load that is about twice as large as that of my ‘peers,’ with pay of about 60 percent of theirs, and all this with a broad grin: ‘Look at us, how democratic and free and tolerant we are!’”60 This while they knew Baran was still recovering from his first heart attack. If it weren’t for his son, Nicky, he told Sweezy, he would leave academia and scrape together a modest living as an honest Marxist intellectual, which is what Sweezy did at the Monthly Review journal. Maybe if he’d had another year he would have done exactly that; it’s hard to imagine how much posterity lost to Baran’s early death. The reason we have so much information regarding the internal dynamics of the administration’s decision making—including a Stanford official linking the “harassment” after the Cuba speech with Baran’s health and a description of the kind of corporate-administrative strategy meeting we’re normally forced to imagine—is that in 1971, in the middle of an even bigger campus intellectual-freedom controversy, someone broke into a locked room, stole the old file, and distributed copies. It’s an important piece of local context for the eruptions that tore the school apart in the years following Paul Baran’s death.
The historic irony is that Stanford’s very inability to absorb Marxist intellectuals like Paul Baran during the 1960s confirmed Baran’s theories. As Stanford Daily reporter Ron Rapoport noted at the time, Stanford was in the middle of a big fundraising campaign, attempting to raise $75 million to match a promised $25 million from the Ford Foundation.61 Baran’s work failed to flatter potential donors, and by lending legitimacy to the Castro regime he was an accessory to the expropriation of corporate property. As the Texaco letter made clear, Stanford University was in a zero-sum struggle against the Cuban people—as well as the Guatemalan people, the Iranian people, and the people anywhere Stanford donors owned stuff, which was a lot of places. In that fight, Baran was proudly on the wrong side. The middle-aged Harvard-trained economists dedicated Monopoly Capital in six letters: “For Che.”
