In 1966, junior Republican congressional representative Donald Rumsfeld first cut his political teeth leading a campaign against the military-industrial complex. Rumsfeld criticized the impropriety of the relationship between President Johnson and Brown and Root, the military contractor and oil-field services company that was a subsidiary of Halliburton. Decades later, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld worked alongside Vice-President Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, as the company secured unprecedented contracts during the US war in Iraq. Whereas military contracting had once represented for Rumsfeld the unethical government patronage of the Democratic Party, by the end of the century military contracting signified government thrift, a cost-saving turn to the market in a new era of warfare. Interweaving Rumsfeld’s career with Halliburton’s rise, this article charts Rumsfeld’s strange journey from Halliburton critic to Halliburton champion to highlight this continuity in capitalism and in military contracting across the second half of the twentieth century.
In the popular imagination, 1960s radicalism often appears as a national phenomenon that varied little from region to region. The case of downtown Manhattan during these years, however, challenges this assumption. Student radicals at New York University in Greenwich Village were just as concerned with issues of urban equity and the politics of urban space as they were with more national concerns, such as ending the Vietnam War. NYU students advocated that the university offer open admissions and free tuition to any New Yorker who wished to attend and fought against what they perceived to be the university’s imperialistic management of Bellevue Hospital.In this paper, I consider the ways in which late 1960s radicals in downtown Manhattan negotiated how a city should be constituted, and I argue that, in challenging the concrete city conditions that they deemed to be indicative of larger systemic problems, these radicals’ activism represents not only a piece of 1960s radical history but also a chapter of local urban history. Manhattan radicalism in the 1960s was predicated on the urban environment that it was a part of, and a consideration of the radical efforts to reconstruct the postwar city is essential to understanding period radicalism and the development of cities.The rapid and transformative changes in American metropolitan areas after the Second World War and the leftist radicalism that is the hallmark of the decade are narratives that commentators often tell as two different, unrelated stories, even though, in the case of New York City, student activism had everything to do with the postwar city. My examination of radicals’ work to enact local change takes steps toward furthering the efforts of a generation of scholars who have tried to complicate our view of “the sixties.”Dans l’imaginaire populaire, le radicalisme des années soixante semble souvent un phénomène peu variable d’une région à une autre. Cependant, en considérant la situation des quartiers du sud de Manhattan, cette supposition est remise en question. Les étudiants radicaux de New York University (NYU) à Greenwich Village étaient autant concernés par des enjeux d’équité urbaine et la politique de développement urbain que par des sujets nationaux, comme mettre un terme à la guerre du Vietnam. Les étudiants de NYU ont lutté pour des admissions plus ouvertes et l’annulation des droits de scolarité pour tous les New Yorkais qui souhaitaient aller à l’université. Ils combattaient ce qu’ils percevaient comme de l’impérialisme de la part de l’Université dans la gestion de l’hôpital Bellevue.Dans cet article, j’aborde les manières par lesquelles les radicaux de Manhattan des années soixante ont déterminé comment une ville devait être constituée. Je soutiens qu’en contestant les conditions urbaines, ils ont mis en lumière des problèmes systémiques plus larges. L’activisme de ces radicaux ne constitue pas seulement une partie de l’histoire radicale des années soixante, mais aussi un chapitre de l’histoire locale et urbaine. Le radicalisme de Manhattan d...
American cities have been transnational in nature since the first urban spaces emerged during the colonial period. Yet the specific shape of the relationship between American cities and the rest of the world has changed dramatically in the intervening years. In the mid-20th century, the increasing integration of the global economy within the American economy began to reshape US cities. In the Northeast and Midwest, the once robust manufacturing centers and factories that had sustained their residents—and their tax bases—left, first for the South and West, and then for cities and towns outside the United States, as capital grew more mobile and businesses sought lower wages and tax incentives elsewhere. That same global capital, combined with federal subsidies, created boomtowns in the once-rural South and West. Nationwide, city boosters began to pursue alternatives to heavy industry, once understood to be the undisputed guarantor of a healthy urban economy. Increasingly, US cities organized themselves around the service economy, both in high-end, white-collar sectors like finance, consulting, and education, and in low-end pink-collar and no-collar sectors like food service, hospitality, and health care. A new legal infrastructure related to immigration made US cities more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than ever before. At the same time, some US cities were agents of economic globalization themselves. Dubbed “global cities” by celebrants and critics of the new economy alike, these cities achieved power and prestige in the late 20th century not only because they had survived the ruptures of globalization but because they helped to determine its shape. By the end of the 20th century, cities that are not routinely listed among the “global city” elite jockeyed to claim “world-class” status, investing in high-end art, entertainment, technology, education, and health care amenities to attract and retain the high-income white-collar workers understood to be the last hope for cities hollowed out by deindustrialization and global competition. Today, the extreme differences between “global cities” and the rest of US cities, and the extreme socioeconomic stratification seen in cities of all stripes, is a key concern of urbanists.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.