A Study of the US Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-1995 The Dialectics of Power and Dissent: A Study of the U.S. Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program Carol Griffith Davies University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Davies, Carol Griffith, "The Dialectics ofower P and Dissent: A Study of the U.S. Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1995. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2786 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Carol Griffith viesDa entitled "The Dialectics of Power and Dissent: A Study of the U.S. Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Sociology. Sherry Cable, Donald Clelland, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Gaventa, Robert Gorman, John Nolt Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Carol Griffith Davies entitled, "The Dialectics of Power and Dissent: A Study of the U.S. Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program." I have examined the final copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requjrements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Sociology. Dr. Sherry Cable, Major Professor Dr. "'naldci�elland,CMJ..-1 Major Professor \Ve have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: ) /� •. 't ' ! Accepted for the Council: Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School The Dialectics of Power and Dissent: A Study of the U. S. Army's Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program. A Dissertation Presen ted for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Carol Griffith Davies August 1995 Copyright © Carol Griffith Davies, 1995 All ri ghts reserved 11 DEDICATION To my husband, Tom; To my mother and father, who made a larger life possible for me; To William and Andrew; to Amber and David who will inherit our democracy and what we make of it. 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the course of this research, I have accumulated many debts. First, I would like to thank my major professors, Dr. Donald Cleveland and Dr. Sherry Cable for their invaluable guidance, patience and support. I have come to appreciate the role of the scholar I teacher through their example. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Dr. John Gaventa, Dr. Robert Gorman and Dr. John Nolt. I would like to thank Mr. Shannon Wilson, the archivist in charge of Special Collections at Berea College for his kindness and Mrs. Jerry Parrish Dimitrov, Curator of the John Wilson Townsend Room at Eastern Kentucky University. I am indebted to Berea College for permission to publish excerpts from documents contained in the Southern Appalachian Archives and to the U. S. Army, Public Affairs Officer, Ms. Marilyn Tischbin, in the Office of the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD., for permission to publish graphics and other documents which appear in the appendices. The following people deserve special recognition for helpful discussions: Dr. Vladimir Protopopescu and Dr. David L. Feldman, both of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Professor Andrew Grimes, in the department of Organizational Management Studies at the University of Kentucky at Frankfort. I would like to thank two diligent proofreaders for their tireless efforts on my behalf: Althea Tate of the ORNL Physics Division and Lisa Davies Nydick. I am also grateful to the Center fo r Computationally Intensive Physics, in the Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) for technical support. I would like to IV recognize Professor Conner Bailey, Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at Auburn University for generously sharing with me the fruits of his research and for providing me with numerous pertinent documents. I would like to thank Dr. Ken Tennell of Eastern Kentucky University for allowing us to make use of his home as a base of operations during the entire course of the field work. His gracious support was a life line without which this research could not have been completed. Most of all, I am happy to acknowledge my debt to all the citizen activists whose names cannot be mentioned because of the rules governing privacy. Without their support, cooperation, enthusiasm and friendship, this research would have been impossible. I am indebted to many of them for sharing with us, not only their home and hearth, but also, in many cases, boxes of valuable documents pertaining to the history of the struggle. I am grateful to the many military and civilian personnel at the Pentagon for their openness and candor and to the many state and local officials who shared with me their time and experiences with this issue. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, K. Thomas R. Davies. He shared each step of this long odyssey and saw many of the ideas expressed in this work develop. No one ever had a better friend. v Abstract This research is a study of power in contemporary American society which calls into question the assumptions of openness and permeability so cherished by the pluralists. Within a power framework, we explore the functional realities of government that illuminate why some powerful interests manage to prevail with some consistency, while the broad public is assigned to a lesser task. The context for the study is the U. S. Army's $ 11 billion dollar Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program (CSDP). The Army's decision to use on-site incineration for the destruction of the stockpile ignited a social movement in opposition. Employing participant observation and in depth interviews, we analyze the citizen-led opposition movement that began at the Lexingtron-Bluegrass Army Depot (LBAD) in Kentucky, and the ambiguous role of the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act ) regulatory process. Using the 'three dimensions of power' framework formulated by Steven Lukes (1974) and extended by Gaventa (1980), and Bachrach and Baratz (1974), we uncovered patterns of power (i.e.,"hidden faces of power") that allowed the Army to exploit some issues and suppress others while all the time urging that citizens abide by "the process." This was accomplished chiefly through the 'mobilization of bias', and propped up by a heavily financed public relations campaign which emanates from the Pentagon. We conclude with some recommendations for what can be done to revitalize our morib und democracy. Vl Preface In the 'SO's, Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the growing power of the military-industrial complex. His words are now almost a cliche. However, never has it been more imperative that we understand the degree to which the military in conjunction with industry and governmental agencies, have taken control over the realm of what used to be public discourse. In seeking to clarify the nature of the military-industrial complex, Pilisuk and Hayden (1965) extend the concept. They state that the United States does not contain a military industrial complex, but instead argue that the United States "is a military industrial complex" {p. 68). They write, "We are describing the current system as one of overall 'minimal accountability' and 'minimal consent'. We mean that the role of democratic review, based on popular consent, is made marginal and reactive. Elite groups are minimally accountable to publics and have a substantial, though my no means, maximum, freedom to shape popular attitudes" {Pilisuk and Hayden 1965, p. 68). It is important to emphasize at the outset that the furor surrounding the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program is not a technical controversy, nor is it just another local "siting problem," but a profoundly disturbing illustration of deep-seated structural change, a move away from 'government by the people.' The story that follows is several things: (1) It is a story of empowerment, of citizens' attempts to take control of decisions that affect their lives and that of their children; {2) it is the story of power holders and their attempts to thwart citizens' efforts; and {3) it is, in the final analysis, a Vll demonstration of a profoundly disturbing trend in the United States, away from classical notions of 'democracy' toward a form hollowed out of any real meaning involving "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," to a democracy that is just a shell for the operation of unbridled state power aided by the very laws that were designed to protect both the citizens and the environment. This then, is a study of power, the power of the modern state to insure its prerogatives through organized institutional arrangements and propaganda. My viewpoint, in telling the story of the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Program is different from the account as told by the Army in which the destruction of the stockpile is presented as an issue of "national interest" in terms of our treaty obligations and the Congressional mandate. Howard Zinn (1980) reminds us that "nations are not communities and never have been." He writes, "The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex" (Zinn 1980, p.