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Flapping Jaws

Illinois ranks last in war spending. That’s bad?

Illinois Times

April 26, 1994

So voracious is the appetite for federal pork in Illinois that many a public official is willing to eat Pentagon spending  even if it’s rancid.

 

Not long ago the New York Times, that archive of folly, told the story of the U.S. Army's new Sergeant York air defense gun. Computerized, radar-guided, mounted on an armored tank chassis, the Sergeant York is designed to shoot down prop-driven planes and helicopters. To accomplish this useful chore, the Sergeant York is programmed to fire at whirring blades.

 

On the face of it, such a gun would seem unnecessary. Combat in Vietnam proved that helicopters can be brought down by conventional small arms fire. (This is not something most generals would be likely to know; the only potshots they received came from the press.) Helicopters seem unlikely to be brought down by the Sergeant York, unfortunately. During tests the gun refused to fire at any of the whirring targets offered to it. Instead (quoting the Times) it "zeroed in on what it considered a more promising target: the exhaust fan in a nearby latrine."

 

Well, what do you expect for $4.2 billion? The story of waste in Pentagon procurement is a familiar one by now. The Department of Defense is rivaled only by the Social Security Administration when it comes to spending tax money on obsolete equipment. Yet, if I take the meaning of editorialists correctly, the fact that such a useless weapon is being built at such a staggering cost should irk me less than the fact that it is not being built in Illinois.

 

Illinois ranks forty-eighth among the states in the share of the Pentagon budget which is spent within its borders. This fact has always left me well disposed toward life here where the corn grows as  high as a whistle-blower's eye. The pacifist in me is proud that the most lethal product we Illinoisans loose upon the peoples of the world is pork chops.

 

Alas, our politicians are not content with real pork. Sen. "Charles" Percy, for example, tried and failed in recent weeks to get the Army to station a division at Joliet. Given the deteriorating state of Chicago politics, this might actually be prudent public policy. But the Army said no. Percy is on the wrong Senate committee.

 

The right committee is, of course, the Senate Armed Services Committee, one of whose proud members is Illinois' own Alan Dixon. No sooner had the ink dried on his new stationery than Dixon clambered atop an ammo box to shout his intention to right this historic wrong and get more bucks for the bang in Illinois.

 

The case for more war spending in the Midwest being advanced by Dixon and likeminded thinkers transcends partisan affiliations, as well as the usual philosophical ones. (Dixon, for example, is less a hawk or a dove than he is a vulture.) Their pleas often are as ingenuous as they are ingenious. In February, Springfield's State Journal-Register decried what it called "the negligible defense spending, that trickles into our area." "It is in the long-term interest of the nation that the Defense Department help keep industry in the Midwest . . . viable," the SJR went on, "so that it is available in case of emergencies." What emergencies? In case Florida is hijacked to Cuba? In case the Japanese take out an option on California? What the paper meant by "emergency" is a general mobilization of the sort which attends major conventional wars.

 

We should all live so long. It is one of the doleful aspects of the nuclear age that major wars will no longer last long enough for anyone to make money from them.

 

The blizzard of stories about Pentagon waste has left Dixon and others careful not to phrase their ambitions for their states in terms of bacon. Instead, he couches his plea in terms of the need for more competitive bidding and "regional balance" in military spending. For those who have not followed the issue, competitive bidding is to Midwest industry what affirmative action is to black construction workers. The dilemma is much the same. In both cases economic grievances can be redressed only at the cost of economic inefficiency. The aim of competitive bidding, for example, is to achieve lower costs. Yet lower costs and regional balance must remain contradictory hopes as long as the Sunbelt states pay lower wages and build in more efficient plants than their Midwest competitors.

 

Regional disparities are not necessarily political in origin, either. Illinois doesn't get a lot of contracts to build aircraft carriers, for example. One of the reasons is that aircraft carriers still need to be built fairly close to an ocean. (Can you imagine what UPS would have to charge to get the Enterprise from here to San Diego? And what if nobody was home when it got there?) Even given the stunning floods which a generation of dam-building and channelizing has produced in the Mississippi Valley, it is difficult to envision a missile cruiser being built in, say, Aurora and floated down to the Gulf for launch. Illinois is not" even well placed to land a toilet paper contract, at least not until a way is found to make it from corn cobs instead of trees. (Yes, I know. But the generals would never stand for it.) A certain regional imbalance in military spending, in short, is necessary and wise.

 

We may live to see a shipyard in Aurora yet, if the boys in the war room manage to avoid blowing us all up before Dixon attains the chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee. We may also live to regret it. Economist Wilbur Maki of the University of Minnesota—a state which does rather better than Illinois in the arms lottery—explained why not long ago to the Twin Cities' City Pages newspaper. Big contractors will often fabricate components in other states, where costs are lower or facilities are better equipped. The result is that Pentagon dollars spent with Illinois firms aren't necessarily spent in Illinois.

 

However, those dollars flow across state borders in both directions. James Fossett and Fred Giertz, both staff members of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, pointed out this fact in a guest essay in the Chicago Tribune the other day. Much of the employment gains from Pentagon spending result from increased orders for the material used to build ships, tanks, and other such equipment.

 

And Illinois is a major supplier of the steel, metal castings, machine tools, and electrical components which go into that equipment. The result, say Fossett and Giertz, are "increases in production and employment in the state which are not reflected in the original distribution of contracts."

 

Some Illinois firms, heavy construction equipment manufacturers especially, are uniquely qualified to offer lowest-cost goods to Pentagon buyers. Caterpillar earlier this year landed contracts worth more than $112 million over five years for road graders. The problem (if you consider it a problem) is that the kinds of goods which Illinois manufacturers make are small potatoes compared to aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. The $112 million spent on road graders is barely enough to re-sod one of the generals' private golf courses in Virginia.

 

Worse, while such contracts are coveted because they produce short-term distortions in the political opinion polls, they also produce longer-term distortions in state economies. Companies are forced to compete for limited numbers of skilled workers. This tends to drive up salary levels artificially, since the Pentagon will always outbid the private sector, raising the cost of doing business for everyone. These distortions are all the more pronounced since much recent spending for the military is in high-tech fields whose beneficiaries are not the unskilled and semiskilled who populate the unemployment offices, but engineers, systems analysts, programmers, and so on. And since military spending tends to be unstable, any shift of resources toward that sector means cheating the civilian sector of resources needed for more sustainable growth. When the Pentagon contract runs out, the state ends up looking like Texas after the bottom fell out of oil prices.

 

The people who complain about paying federal taxes don't mind wasting them, in short, provided always that the waste ends up in their pockets. Maybe the Army can find a use for the Sergeant York after all. Just re-program its target radar to focus on flapping jaws. ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

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Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

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Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

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Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

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