Weapons of War
Featuring an interview with Drew McKevitt and Marshall Poe's latest article in Foreign Policy.
Guns, Violence, and America
Guns are not the only weapons of war. There are rockets, flamethrowers, grenades, torpedoes, nuclear weapons, and far too many more to list. In most places, it is illegal to possess any of these weapons, full stop. But guns, especially in the United States, are an exception. In the wake of World War II, millions of weapons were strewn across the European continent. Clever American businessmen saw an arbitrage opportunity. They refurbished old WWII weapons and sold them to consumers in one of the only places that granted citizens the freedom to keep and bear arms. What happens in war zones: the weapons used and the tactics employed can resonate through civilian populations for years.
Scholarly Sources
Andrew C. McKevitt is John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University.
Listen to Professor Susan Liebell’s interview with Drew about GUN COUNTRY:
Q: You just published Gun Country with UNC Press. What’s the most surprising thing you learned or discovered writing the book?
A: There were lots of exciting (and sometimes terrifying) discoveries during research for this book. But maybe the one that most startled me was just how little Americans knew about guns as a kind of economic and social phenomenon as late as 1968 when Congress passed the Gun Control Act. Of course, the United States always had this tradition of being a gun country, and so many Americans absorbed that narrative in the 20th century. But at an empirical level, nobody knew anything about how many guns there were, where they came from, who made them, who bought them, and so forth. It was only in 1968 that Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to investigate these questions (it became known as the Eisenhower Commission, named for its chair, the former president’s brother, Milton). The commission’s records, mostly unused to this point by scholars, contain mountains of data about the gun country that the United States became after 1945. It was startling to consider: here’s an object that had defined the American experience, and yet Americans knew so little about it and its influence in a material sense.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I am one of those people who has four or five books going at once, and almost none of them are in my narrow professional specialty. But I did just happen to finish Patrick Charles’ Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States, which is probably the best history of the NRA as a political organization we’re likely to get for a long time. It pairs well with my book, and it’s exciting that these two books have both come out this fall. I am also currently reading Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine and Ha Jin’s novel War Trash.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to give to people and why?
A: My favorite book to assign the last few years is Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. I don’t think there’s a better book for introducing a general reading public to a critical approach to U.S. foreign relations history, especially the debate over the nature and meaning of U.S. empire. It is sneaky in that way, embedding smart analysis grounded in the best scholarship within compelling vignettes and approachable, engaging writing.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: For someone trained in my field of U.S. foreign relations history, it’s probably a cliché answer, but for me: William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy was a major intellectual influence when I first read it as an undergrad. It was influential not just for its argument—that U.S. engagement with the world is driven not by responses to external stimuli but by internal actors with economic and political agendas—but more simply just for its argumentativeness, bordering on combativeness. To that point, I had understood history as so many new undergrads do, as a collection of obscure facts and interesting stories about the past. Williams showed me history as a conversation and an ever-evolving debate that connected the past to the present.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: It would be a toss-up between Joan Didion and James Baldwin. Both had brilliant things to say, of course, but I admire them most as stylists, though their respective styles were totally different. Didion’s writing was so dry and acerbic, and cut so quickly to the contradictions and absurdities of postwar American life. The writing voice in my head aspires to be Didion’s, even if it never comes out that way. If Didion makes me want to be a better writer, Baldwin makes me want to be a better reader. Reading Baldwin sets your brain on fire. (I would also invite Kurt Vonnegut to this dead-writer party but I have to draw the line somewhere).
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: My favorite book of the past year is R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence. Kuang is brilliant, both a scholar and a prolific novelist. Babel is a twist on the Rowling premise of an English school for magically-inclined students, Harry Potter with a healthy dose of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Kuang’s Yellowface is also at the top of my list for the year. So impressive!
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: I recently watched Blue Eye Samurai, a Netflix animated series that I think easily ranks among the best TV of the last decade. As someone who wrote about Japanese pop culture and the United States in my first book, the conceits were inherently appealing: it’s U.S.-produced but heavily influenced by anime, with characters who challenge racial and gender ideology in 17th century Japan. So of course it was made just for me—but also it’s so well done! It delivers, narratively and visually, and in terms of voice acting, it’s just outstanding from top to bottom. If you are one of the few holdouts on animation as a serious and compelling medium, give it a try.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: The holidays are the perfect time to waste whole days with very large books. So I am planning to dive into Jennifer Burns’ new biography of Milton Friedman as well as Olga Tokarczuk’s epic novel of Polish history, The Books of Jacob. I also have a large stack of comic books and graphic novels that I’ve neglected for too long.
The Myth of the Vietnam War
Editor-in-Chief of the New Books Network, Marshall Poe, recently published The Reality of the My Lai Massacre and the Myth of the Vietnam War. For Foreign Policy, he published an excerpt of the book, which re-examines the causes of the deadliest civilian massacre of the Vietnam War and how the response to the cover-up shaped broader perceptions about the war in American culture. In particular, Marshall reconstructs the events of My Lai Massacre minute-by-minute, using the archives of the Peers Commission, and he examines the myth that there were hundreds of massacres perpetrated by US forces on the scale of My Lai.
Read the excerpt here: “Confusion and Ambition Caused the My Lai Atrocities”
