Whither the Arc of the Moral Universe?

Abstract

Whither the Arc of the Moral Universe? Robert H. Churchill (bio) Pamela Haag. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2016. xxv + 496 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.99. Pamela Haag has taken on a very ambitious project. She sets out to trace the influence of gun manufacturers on U.S. gun culture. What emerges from that quest is at once a business history of arms manufacturing, a cultural analysis of the figure of the “lone gunman” as a heroic figure, and an exploration of an early countercultural outcry against the moral toxicity of the gun trade. All three aspects of the book are provocative, but they are not equally successful. Moreover, the book raises the question of whether there are limits to the creative imagining that should be employed in a work that purports to be a nonfiction history. In the first section of the book, Haag argues that the concept of interchangeability better describes the place of guns in America than celebrations of the gun as the exceptional icon of an exceptional people. She maintains that, prior to the Civil War, guns were treated largely as tools, one consumer product of many, and held no special significance in culture, law, or social identity. In other words, in this period, America had no gun culture. She notes that early gun manufacturers got their start producing guns for the U.S. Government and that there was next to no civilian market. In this era of craft production, symbolized by Eli Whitney’s operations at the Springfield armory, gun manufacturing represented a public-private partnership, and government armories served as incubators of technological innovation. After 1840, this era gave way to entrepreneurs who separated their operations from government facilities and focused on precision machining, the division of labor, and the protection of intellectual property. These private corporations found markets hard to come by, as there was still little civilian demand for guns, and government contracts were awarded through a labyrinthine process of lobbying and corrupt influence peddling. Early entrepreneurs such as Samuel Colt turned to foreign markets in desperation. The exhibition of the American system of manufacturing at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 marked a breakthrough moment. The display of their technical [End Page 83] prowess allowed Colt and other entrepreneurs to crack the European market and reverse what had been a long-standing pattern of American imports of European arms. The second section of the book follows the trajectory of the Winchester Company between 1868 and 1925 and the family fortune that it spawned. This section constitutes a densely interwoven elaboration of several themes. The first is the influence of industrial capitalism on the manufacturing of guns. Capitalist ideology, particularly in the antebellum period and the Gilded Age, encouraged arms manufacturers to disregard the social costs of their trade, to think of their products as unexceptional and of no more moral freight than any other. The structure of the marketplace required these industrialists to build consumer demand for their products, as steady consumer demand was an absolute necessity for business survival. Companies that over-relied on military demand were repeatedly destroyed by the inevitable collapse of demand at the end of wars, just at the time the debts the companies had accumulated to increase production to meet war demand came due. Foreign sales might help stave off disaster, but these too could vanish in the blink of an eye. Only those companies that successfully stimulated consumer demand for guns remained solvent through these boom-and-bust cycles. A second theme is the gun industry’s role in propagating the cultural icon of the lone gunman, which Haag argues is at the core of contemporary U.S. gun culture. She traces the industry’s influence across three periods: 1868–90, 1890–1914, and 1917–21. In the first period, Winchester envisioned a civilian market segmented into farmers, hunters, frontiersmen, and urbanites concerned with self-protection. Extolling the speed and accuracy of his 1873-model repeating rifle, Winchester described the power it gave to the individual faced with numerous targets, both animal and human. In Haag’s words, “it would...