From the Archives: On D-Day anniversary, historian Arthur Herman recalls WWII industrial effort

On D-Day anniversary, historian Arthur Herman recalls WWII industrial effort
June 6, 2012 12:22 PM MST

Charlottesville-based historian Arthur Herman is the author of six books, including the Pulitzer-Prize finalist Gandhi & Churchill (2008) and the New York Times best-seller How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001).

Herman’s latest book is Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, which was published last month by Random House.

On the 68th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy, the historian met with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner at the Boar’s Head Inn to talk about the new book, which he sums up as a story about “releasing the innate productive power of American business.”

Herman pointed out there were two business enterprises in Charlottesville that manufactured products that were critical to the American war effort.


Charlottesville’s war effort
One was Ix Mills, located where the Frank Ix building still stands south of downtown.

During the war, he said, Ix Mills “moved from making commercial textiles to making parachute cloth. They really became the center of the parachute cloth making for the Second World War.”

The soldiers “who jumped on D-Day” as portrayed in Stephen Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan, as well as the “airmen who had to jump out over Germany and at sea during the Second World War were using Charlottesville-produced parachutes.”

The other Charlottesville company that Herman discovered during his research was Southern Welding, which “made various kinds of iron piping and steel tubing. During the war, they shifted to making the steel tubing for aircraft, to contain all the electric lines and so on in B-24s and B-25s. What they also did, and their real breakthrough, is they developed the parts for arrester gear on navy aircraft carriers.”

The arrester gear allowed planes to land on the carriers without being pulled apart by a braking mechanism.

“Southern Welding, here in Charlottesville, developed the parts and manufactured the parts that went on aircraft carriers all across the Pacific. In fact, at one point, Charlottesville-made arrester gear and tailhook gear was on 43 separate aircraft carriers during the Second World War.”


Remembering D-Day
When Herman thinks about D-Day, in particular, he focuses on two things.

“First of all,” he explained, D-Day was about more than amassing military personnel “but also amassing a vast industrial effort.”

Two thirds of the landing craft and sea-going vessels used on D-Day were produced in American factories, he said, and “it’s a tribute not just to the bravery of our armed forces but also to the huge logistical possibilities that American industry could generate a landing and an enterprise of the sort that the world had never seen.”

The second thing about D-Day that comes to Herman’s mind is that “the very first Americans to get news that the landings were successful were the people working the night shifts in the factories on the East Coast.”

At the Bethlehem Shipyard in Sparrow’s Point in Baltimore, he recalled, “work stopped and everybody sank to their knees and said the Lord’s Prayer as they got the news.”

That, he said, is “really fitting, that the people who produced the tools that made that victory possible were the very first to learn that what they had done, and what they had contributed to, had been a success.”


Publisher's note: Today is the 73rd anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II

This article is drawn from my Examiner.com archives. It was originally published on Examiner.com on June 6, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: Author Craig Shirley considers whether Ronald Reagan was a libertarian

Author Craig Shirley considers whether Ronald Reagan was a libertarian

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the death of President Ronald Reagan. He died on June 5, 2004, the eve of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion and the 20th anniversary of his speech at Normandy remembering “the boys of Pointe du Hoc.”

Earlier this year, Craig Shirley, author of Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All and of Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America, came to Charlottesville to speak at the Virginia Festival of the Book.

In an interview that weekend with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, Shirley noted how Reagan viewed libertarianism as intrinsic to conservatism and often defined himself as a libertarian.

'Heart and soul'
Reagan, he explained, gave an interview to Reason magazine in 1975, in which “he said that libertarianism is the fundamental basis for American conservatism.”

That interview, conducted by Reason's founding editor Manuel Klausner, appeared in the magazine's July 1975 issue. In it, Reagan said that “if you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism... The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”

Shirley pointed out that, “for a time, [Reagan] referred to himself publicly as a 'libertarian conservative.' I have interviews with him on CBS in which he referred to himself as a 'libertarian conservative.'”

Reagan, Shirley explained, “was not libertine but he was very much of the opinion, following Locke, Paine, and Jefferson, that [limited government] was about the individual and the privacy and the rights and the dignity of the individual. He said that many, many times in his political career.”

Anti-gay Briggs Amendment
As an example of Reagan's libertarianism, Shirley recalled the then-future president's opposition to the Briggs Amendment in California, a 1978 voter initiative that would have banned gay men and lesbians from teaching in government schools.

John Briggs, he explained, was a California state senator in California. Briggs “had seen the political success that Anita Bryant had done in Dade County” with her campaign to end the local anti-discrimination ordinance that protected gay workers. “Her political star began to rise as she was taking on the gay rights movement,” he said, noting that “Briggs had higher aspirations; he wanted to run for governor of California.”

Briggs, he explained, “came up with an idea that would prohibit either those who championed a homosexual lifestyle or those who were gay and were out from being public school teachers. This deeply offended Ronald Reagan. You could say it was because of his libertarianism, or because of his upbringing, because of his mother's [influence] about allowing people to live and let live, or because of his cosmopolitan lifestyle that he was aware of during his days in Hollywood. He may have been informed by all three experiences but he was against it and he campaigned against it.”

The November 1978 referendum was defeated by a 14-point margin and afterwards, Shirley recalled, Briggs had a press conference where he “was asked by a reporter, why did it lose?”

Briggs replied: “Ronald Reagan. Reagan campaigned against it, and that was it.”

Confirmation
Shirley's recollections are confirmed in an article by James Duke Mason on June 5 in The Advocate, an LGBT magazine.

“Believe it or not,” Mason wrote, “Reagan was one of the first major politicians in history to come out for gay rights. Just a year before he announced his candidacy for president, he came out forcefully” against the Briggs Amendment.

Not only did Reagan “have no political incentive to do it, but it could’ve been a huge catastrophe. In speaking out against the initiative, Reagan used language that was way ahead of its time; he argued that 'prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.' Some dismiss his support as too last-minute to have made a difference. But as his biographer Lou Cannon once put it, Reagan knew the risks but 'chose to state his convictions.'”

Briggs himself blamed Reagan for his amendment's defeat. Could he have equally blamed Reagan's core libertarianism?

SUGGESTED LINKS

Craig Shirley recalls events at the start of World War II in 'December 1941'
Virginia Senate candidates remember Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday
Historian Paul Kengor on Ronald Reagan and the collapse of the USSR - Part I
Historian Paul Kengor on Ronald Reagan and the collapse of the USSR - Part II
Amity Shlaes discusses significance of Calvin Coolidge at Heritage Foundation

Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/author-craig-shirley-considers-whether-ronald-reagan-was-a-libertarian

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on June 6, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.