As a historian, my training is about analyzing the past. Those times I have strayed into predicting the future, I have failed pretty spectacularly (”Yes, class, I predict that the Berlin Wall will not come down in my lifetime or yours!”--Oct 23, 1989).
And yet... the installation of the new Secretary of State Ashton Carter makes me look a bit prophetic after all! In 2013 I wrote a piece about US secretaries of war and defense and their role in the warfare/welfare state system. As I was working on this, I decided to analyze all war and defense secretaries since McKinley’s administration. A short version of my study appeared as a Mises Daily essay.
One point that emerged from this prosopographical analysis was that this position within the modern American state requires a highly specialized human being, if the past is any indication. The profiles of all secretaries of war and defense yield up some very marked qualifications, a majority of which almost all the secretaries have displayed. All are Ivy Leaguers--no surprises there. But almost none are legacy Ivy Leaguers. Instead, they tend to be smart kids from middle class families who made it to Yale or Princeton on a scholarship and succeeded because of their middle-class work ethic and brains. Several other other characteristics emerge in the article. But they almost almost all come from a geographical triangle whose corners are somewhere west of New York City, somewhere around Baltimore, and, roughly, Toledo, Ohio. In fact, seventy percent of the war or defense secretaries have come from this Bermuda Triangle. About half of those are from Ohio, Pennsylvania, or New York. And nearly all were from small cities or towns. Many of their families were artistic (including a number of aspiring musicians). Oh, and all the secretaries have been men.
So Ashton Carter fits in the middle of the pool: raised in Abington Township, PA (on the outskirts of Philadelphia, significantly). His family is middle class, and as with many of his confraternity, one parent was teacher (English teacher). In Carter’s case, his father was a physician (psychiatry and neurology) at the local hospital. This status puts him a bit higher on the socio-economic ladder than most, but still within range. Many emerged from their families with writing and the arts in their blood, and Ashton Carter’s senior thesis at Yale, “Qarks, Charm, and the Psi Particle,” will do in satisfying this requirement. In earlier generations they tended to write for their school newspapers.
Carter has not, apparently, worked for an investment bank, which many of his confreres have done, but his academic career has been thoroughly in the mode of dealing, at least, with the high-rollers of the grant-giving institutions that investment banking fortunes have spawned.
And of course, my observation in the article was not that they have all been alike. But there is enough similarity there to remark on the fact. And our new guy is right in the middle of the pack in terms of the group biography, and from exactly the right place geographically. In some way or other, the twentieth-century warfare state demands a special kind of guardian: one whose loyalties and commitments are of a particular and sophisticated kind. But at the same time, they are chosen from among the American elite of intelligence and education, not from the elite of wealth and family.
So... no, I am no prophet. And I am not sure what to make of it all. But my strange discovery will hold good for yet another Secretary of Defense.
PS—By the way, last night, the great-grand-daughter of one of the secretaries of war was up for an Oscar. Nominated for the second time, actually. She didn’t win, but both she and her father, who was nominated last year, are indeed fine actors. It could be that, in line with many other families of secretaries of war and defense, the artistic gene or an artistic family culture was strong in this one. And so, apparently, is the culture of hard work.
