THE MALTHUSIAN PARADOX: WEAPONS RHETORIC BEFORE THE BOMB BY IAN EDWARD JACKSON HILL DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Assistant Professor Ned O’Gorman, Chair Associate Professor Cara Finnegan Professor Clifford Christians Associate Professor Christian Sandvig Abstract The Malthusian Paradox: Weapons Rhetoric Before the Bomb is a longitudinal case study of weapons rhetoric leading up to WWII. It examines how influential weapons rhetors negotiated a technological conundrum that I call the “Malthusian Paradox.” The Malthusian Paradox is the commonplace belief that while technology will destroy humanity, technology also provides humanity’s only means of preservation. The Malthusian Paradox not only clarifies what Thomas R. Malthus thought about populations and political economy at the end of the 18th century in London, but it also clarifies an enduring pattern of deliberation about technology’s effects on overpopulation, globalization, and war. This scheme of ideas began to inform how rhetors navigated weapons discourse, and in turn, the proliferation of the Paradox in weapons rhetoric reiterated and re-inscribed the concept such that it has acquired an aura of permanence, immutability, and inescapability. The Malthusian Paradox thus refers not just to a person, but also to the conundrum he presented to modern society, the manner of thought it germinated, and a persistent technology rhetoric – all of which have a continuing history. Thereby, the Paradox has become a foundational figurative and argumentative principle of technology. I argue that the Malthusian Paradox can be construed as a gauge to compare and assess the strategies and tactics of weapons rhetors communicating in discrete historical contexts across time. I therefore implement a longitudinal case study that combines close textual analyses of specific documents with historical analyses of how weapons and their compatible technological logics developed. I suggest that analyzing how weapons rhetors negotiate the Malthusian Paradox grants insight into how people have invented the current technological conditions, understand war, formulate ideologies, and get anxious about weapons. The case studies examine Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), accused Haymarket bomb conspirator August Spies’s courtroom address (1886), Amos A. Fries’s and Clarence J. West’s army textbook Chemical Warfare (1921), and selected correspondence and Manhattan Project memos of nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. As rhetoric and the Paradox smashed into each other over the historical development of weapons, certain overriding strategies have emerged, demonstrating that many of the rhetorical tactics and strategies associated with the Bomb and modern-day terrorism have much older origins. These overriding strategies function as windows into what might be thought of as the dominant network of weapons discourse that help to constitute their political and ideological presence in the world, and bring populations “before the Bomb.” ii Acknowledgements First of all, thank you to the Department of Communication’s administrative staff, especially Mary Strum, Rhonda Baumgart, Amy Holland, and Susana Vazquez Weigel, as well as Lori Hendricks in the Psychology Department. Thanks to my friends and colleagues with whom I have argued, critiqued, complained, caroused, celebrated, travelled, laughed, mourned, and otherwise lived. Rest in peace, Dale. To Dr. Tom Conley I owe not only my understanding of rhetoric’s historical dept to Pee Wee, but also my understanding of how to attain idiosyncratic professorial habits of the highest order. Style matters. Thank you Dr. Debra Hawhee for your early advice, criticism, and encouragement. Your body rhetoric seminar helped to set the tone. Thank you Dr. Christian Sandvig for your enthusiasm and insightful questions, as well as for encouraging some sort of intellectual radicalism. We’ll see about that. Thank you Dr. Clifford Christians for asking the big questions that will continue to resonate, and for leaving me with what I consider a rather difficult koan. Thank you Dr. Cara Finnegan for your mentorship over the years as teacher, course director, graduate advisor, and committee member, but especially thank you for making me think about what exactly I had gotten myself into along the way. What have I gotten myself into? I extend special gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Ned O’Gorman, who for years provided unassailable advice and prodding at the right moments, in addition to collaborations on research and writing. And really, thanks for putting me through the wringer in the final dissertation push, a process that I know required much effort on your part. UBC = Mission Accomplished. Sweet. I’d thank my dog Hank, but I haven’t taught him how to read yet. Many thanks to my parents for their constant love and support throughout my life’s rambling endeavors. Please visit us often. To my daughters Adelaide and Wini, who provided constant excitement, laughter, rambunctiousness, drama, and love, I owe my capacity to totally shut the dark subjects of my research out of my mind at a moment’s notice. I owe a special gratitude for the joys you two provide. It is difficult to fully state the respect, admiration, and love I have for my wife, Katie, who was willing to leave the comfort of Athens, GA for an unknown future as a grad student’s spouse in central Illinois. “Indeed,” you do own 8% of the dissertation, if not more, for taking care of the house, Hank, and the girls while I cranked out the pages. I cannot wait to begin our new adventure in “Vannn-cooooo-verrr, Vannn-cooooo-verrr.” iii Contents Chapter 1 Paradox and Weapons Rhetoric .........................................................................1 Chapter 2 The Malthusian Paradox in An Essay on the Principle of Population .............26 Chapter 3 Bomb Talking: August Spies and Dynamite at the Haymarket Trial ..............82 Chapter 4 Humane Extermination: The Mustard Gas Advocacy of Major General Amos A. Fries .................................................................................121 Chapter 5 Peaceful Bombs: Pragmatic Idealism in the Correspondence of Leo Szilard .....................................................................................................156 Chapter 6 Conclusion: The Paradox Abides ..................................................................193 Afterword: Technē – Technology/Rhetoric/Philosophy .................................................205 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................218 iv Chapter 1 Paradox and Weapons Rhetoric “The good craftsmen seemed to me to go wrong as much as the poets: because they practiced their technai well, both thought themselves wise in other, most important things, and this error of theirs obscured the wisdom they had.” —Socrates1 At about 9 o’clock in the morning of April 19, 1995, a truck bomb ripped into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion traveled at 7,000 mph and its force of 74,000 pounds equaled the force of a magnitude 4 earthquake.2 The primary explosive agent, ammonium nitrate fertilizer, decimated the entire building’s façade. The bombers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, constructed the bomb by loading 108 fifty-pound bags of the fertilizer, three 500-pound drums of nitromethane fuel, and some ammonium nitrate/diesel fuel oil (ANFO) explosives into a rental truck.3 They killed 168 and injured 680. The surprise attack, which came in response to the U.S. government’s 1993 raid of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, TX became, in an instant, a shocking reminder of the dual uses of synthetic fertilizer. The bombers did not so much convert fertilizer into a weapon as they did implement one of ammonium nitrate’s primary uses – causing massive explosions. German chemist Fritz Haber, who in 1918 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, began researching how to make nitrogen fertilizers in the early 20th century to help agriculture. Haber said of his discovery that “improved nitrogen fertilization of the soil brings new nutritive riches to mankind” to the extent that “the chemical industry comes to the aid of the farmer who, in the good earth, changes stones into bread.”4 In 1911, the technology to mass produce ammonium 1 nitrate must have seemed to Haber like an unequivocal boon for humanity. However, once WWI broke out, Faber applied his ingenuity to not only feeding a hungry wartime population but also exploding the enemy. By inventing an industrial process that combine nitrogen and hydrogen to create ammonia, he helped accomplish both feats. The “Haber Process,” later refined by Carl Bosch, supplied Germany with a significant portion of the ammonium nitrate it needed to arm itself for four years of catastrophic warfare. Moreover, Haber’s chemical acumen prepared him to oversee the first successful German chemical warfare attack with chlorine at Ypres, April 22, 1915. In 1916 he became the director of Germany’s Chemical Warfare Service and his Leune- Werke, a vast chemical factory complex, provided Germany with munitions and fertilizer as the primary producer of each.5 Thus, the same chemist whose technology empowered a massive increase in agricultural production in the 20th century also empowered