Made In America (57 page)

One of the more striking fashions to grow out of World War II was a military affection for acronyms and other such shortenings. The practice had begun in earnest in civilian life during the New Deal years of the 1930s when combinations like
TVA, WPA, OPA
and
PWA
(respectively,
Tennessee Valley Authority, Works Progress Administration, Office of Price Administration and Public Works Authority
) became a part of everyday life. The military took it up with a passion once the world went to war, and devised not only alphabet soup acronyms like
OSRD-WD
(
Office of Scientific Research and Development, Western Division
),
ICWI
(
Interdepartmental Commission on War Information
), and
JMUSDC
(
Joint Mexican-US Defence Commission
), but also novel hybrids like
ComAirSoPa
(for
Commander of Aircraft for the South Pacific
) and
Seabees
(out of
CBs,
from the Navy’s
Construction Battalion
)
.
Occasionally these things had to be rethought. When it was realized that nearly everyone was pronouncing the abbreviation for the Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet in the Pacific,
CinCUS,
as ‘sink us’, it was hastily amended to the more buoyant-sounding
ComInCh.
²⁹

Oddly, one of the things World War II didn’t leave Americans with was a memorable song. Almost every other war had, from ‘Yankee Doodle’ of the Revolution to ‘John Brown’s Body’ and the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ of the Civil War, to World War I’s ‘Over There’. Most World War II songs by contrast seemed to be begging for instant obscurity. Among the more notably forgettable titles to emerge in the early days of fighting were ‘They’re Going to Be Playing Taps on the Japs’, ‘Goodbye, Mama, l’m Off to Yokohama’, ‘Let’s Knock the Hit Out of Hitler’, ‘Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’, and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. Only one achieved anything like permanence in the popular consciousness – and that as a catch-phrase rather than a song. It was based on the supposedly real-life story of a naval chaplain, William A. McGuire, who
reportedly climbed into the seat of an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor after the gunner had been killed and began knocking Japanese planes from the sky as he cried the famous words: ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.’ In fact, as a bemused McGuire told the world after the song became a hit, he had never said any such thing, and indeed had never even fired a gun. All he had done was help lift some boxes of ammunition.
³⁰

On 6 August 1945 President Harry S Truman announced to the nation: ‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It is an atomic bomb.’ It was the first time that most people had heard the term. In the following years many other words connected with splitting the atom would become increasingly familiar to them:
nuclear, fission, fusion, radiation, reactor, mushroom cloud, fallout, fallout shelter, H-bomb, ground zero,
and, unexpectedly,
bikini
for a two-piece swimsuit designed by Louis Reard, a French couturier, in 1946, and named for the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where America had just begun testing atomic bombs.

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of one war and the beginning of another: the cold war. The cold war may not have generated a lot of casualties, but it was none the less the longest and costliest war America has ever fought. War was unquestionably good for business – so good that in 1946 the president of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson, went so far as to call for a ‘permanent war economy’. He more or less got his wish. Throughout the 1950s America spent more on defence than it did on anything else – indeed, almost as much as it did on all other things together. By 1960, military spending accounted for 49.7 per cent of the federal budget – more than the combined national budgets of Britain, France, West
Germany and Italy.
³¹
Even America’s foreign aid was overwhelmingly military. Of the $50 billion that America distributed in aid in the 1950s, 90 per cent was for military purposes.

Cold war,
the term that justified these gargantuan outlays, has often been attributed to the newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. In fact, the expression was first used by the statesman Bernard Baruch at a speech in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947, though credit for its coinage belongs to his speech-writer, Herbert Bayard Swope.
³²
Out of the cold war came two other durable expressions –
iron curtain
and
the domino theory.
The domino theory – the idea that if one nation fell to Communism others would topple in its wake – was first used by the newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop in 1954, though it didn’t become popular until the Vietnam War a decade later.
Iron curtain
is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill in an address he made in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, but in fact the term had been in existence in the sense of an imaginary barrier since 1819, and had been used in political contexts since the 1920s.

The cold war, or more specifically the Cuban missile crisis, also brought to prominence
hawk
and
dove,
though again both had been around for some time.
Dove
had been the symbol of peace for centuries, and
hawk,
in the context of military belligerence, had been coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1798 in the expression
War Hawk.
What was new was the conjoining of the terms to indicate a person’s militaristic leanings.

On the field of battle, the Korean War pitched in with a number of terms, among them
demilitarized zone
and its abbreviated form,
DMZ
(originally signifying the disputed area along the 38th parallel dividing Korea into North and South),
brainwash
(a literal translation of the Mandarin
hsi nao
),
chopper
for a helicopter,
honcho
(from Japanese
hancho,
‘squad leader’) and
hooch
(from Japanese
uchi,
‘house’),
which was at first used to describe the place where a soldier kept his mistress.

Several of these words were resurrected for the war in Vietnam a decade later, though that conflict also spawned many terms of its own, among them
free-fire zone, clicks
for kilometres,
grunt
for a soldier (first used dismissively by Marines, but taken on with affection by infantrymen),
search-and-destroy mission, to buy the farm,
meaning to die in combat,
to frag
(to kill a fellow soldier, usually an officer, with a hand grenade or
fragmentation device;
hence the term) and a broad variety of telling expressions for the Vietnamese:
slope, gook, dink, zip, slant, slant-eye
and
Charlie,
though many of these – like
slant-eye
and
gook
– were older terms recently revived.
Charlie
as an appellation for Vietcong arose because
VC
in radio code was
Victor Charlie.

Among the more sinister terms to catch the world’s attention during the war in Vietnam were
Agent Blue, Agent Orange, Agent Purple
and
Agent White
(for types of
defoliants
– another new word – used to clear fields, destroy crops and generally demoralize and destabilize inhabitants of hostile territory), and
napalm,
from
naphthene palmitate,
which had much the same intent and effect. Though it first became widely known during the Vietnam War,
napalm
was in fact invented during World War II.

The military affection for clumsy acronyms found renewed inspiration in Vietnam with such concoctions as
FREARF
(for
Forward Rearm and Refuel Point
),
SLAR
(
Side-Looking Airborne Radar
),
FLAR
(
Forward-Looking Airborne Radar
) and
ARVN
(pronounced ‘arvin’) for the
Army of the Republic of South Vietnam.
One of the more arresting, if least reported, of the Vietnam era acronyms was
TESTICLES,
a mnemonic for the qualities looked for in members of the Second Ranger Battalion, namely
teamwork, enthusiasm, stamina, tenacity, initiative, courage, loyalty, excellence
and
a sense of humour.

But where the war in Vietnam really achieved semantic
distinction was in the creation of a vast heap of euphemisms, oxymorons and other verbal manipulations designed to create an impression of benignity and order, so that we got
pacification
for eradication,
strategic withdrawal
for retreat,
sanitizing operation
for wholesale clearance,
accidental delivery of armaments
for bombing the wrong target,
to terminate with extreme prejudice
for a political assassination, and many, many others.

The Gulf War, despite its merciful brevity, was also linguistically productive. Among the new formations it inspired were
clean bombing
(i.e., with pinpoint precision),
guest
for a prisoner of war,
headquarters puke
for a junior officer whose responsibilities keep him safely away from the front,
Nintendo effect
(that is, to become desensitized to destruction through watching films of bombing raids that resemble video games of destruction),
Airwing Alpo
for inflight rations on fighter aircraft, the
smart bomb,
and
mother of all,
signifying ultimate, as in ‘mother of all tanks’, ‘mother of all wars’, etc.
³³

Finally, one of the most recent of military neologisms is also one of the most poignant:
ethnic cleansing,
signifying the removal or eradication of a portion of the indigenous population of an area. Apparently coined by Russian observers, it is a product of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and was first reported in English in the 9 July 1991 issue of
The Times.

In 1951 the proprietor of the Hi Hat Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee, purchased a life-size photograph of a naked young woman lying on a fluffy rug, and proudly hung it behind his bar. Even by the relatively chaste standards of the day it was not a terribly revealing picture – only her posterior was exposed to view – and probably nothing more would have come of it except that one day an electrician arrived to do some work and recognized the woman in the photograph as his wife, which surprised him because she had never mentioned that she was doing nude modelling for a local photographer.

The electrician took the Hi Hat to court, and for a short while the matter became first a local and then a national sensation. With the eyes of America on him, Judge Andrew Doyle ruled that as art the photograph was perfectly acceptable, but that as a bar-room decoration it was ‘unquestionably obscene’. He – suggested apparently seriously – that one of the city’s art galleries might like to take it over. In other words, if displayed in a darkened bar where it would be seen by no one but grown-up drinkers, the picture was held to be salacious and corrupting. But if placed in a public forum where anyone of any age could view it, it could be regarded as a local treasure.
¹
And no one anywhere appears to have thought this odd.

I bring this up here to make the point that America’s attitudes towards questions of public and private morality have long been a trifle confused. For this, as for so much else, we can thank the Puritans. As early as 1607,
puritanical
had come to mean
stern, rigid, narrowly moral,
and the view has been steadily reinforced ever since by history texts and literary works like Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
and Longfellow’s
Courtship of Miles Standish.

The Puritan age was, to be sure, one in which even the smallest transgressions – or even sometimes no transgressions at all – could be met with the severest of penalties. Adultery, illegitimacy and masturbation were all at times capital offences in New England. Almost any odd occurrence darkened Puritan suspicions and fired their zeal for swift retribution. In 1651, when the wife of a Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, complained that her husband sometimes threw ‘pease about the Howse and made me pick them up’, and occasionally in his sleep made ‘a gablings Noyse’,
²
the town fathers saw at once that this was witchcraft and hanged him from the nearest gibbet.

Equally unlucky was George Spencer of New Haven, Connecticut. When a one-eyed pig was born in the town, the magistrates cast around for an explanation and lighted on the hapless Spencer, who also had but one eye. Questioned as to the possibility of bestiality, the frightened Spencer confessed, but then recanted. Under Connecticut law to convict Spencer of bestiality required the testimony of two witnesses. So keen were the magistrates to hang him that they admitted the pig as one witness and his retracted confession as another.
³

But in many other ways colonial New England was not as simon pure (the expression comes from a play of 1718 by Susanna Cenlivre called A
Bold Stroke for a Wife,
and involving a character named Simon Pure) as we might think. Just half a century after the
Mayflower
Pilgrims landed on
Massachusetts’s shores, Boston was ‘filled with prostitutes’, and other colonial centres were equally well equipped with opportunities for sexual licence. Despite its modest size, Williamsburg, capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1779, contained three brothels (though curiously none of these have been incorporated into the sanitized replica community so popular with visitors today).
⁴

Sex among the Puritans was considered as natural as eating, and was discussed about as casually, to the extent that ‘the writings of the Puritans required heavy editing before they were thought fit to print even in the mid-twentieth century’.
⁵
Premarital intercourse was not just tolerated but effectively encouraged. Couples who intended to marry could take out something called a
Pre-Contract
– in effect, a licence to have sex. It was the Puritans, too, who refined the curious custom of
bundling,
or
tarrying
as it was just as often called, in which a courting pair were invited to climb into bed together. Though the practice appears to have originated in Wales, it was sufficiently little known in Britain to have become a source of perennial wonder for British visitors to New England up to the time of the American Revolution and somewhat beyond. As one seventeenth century observer explained it: