In an era when the cries over the outsourcing of American manufacturing are only drowned out by the sound of Chinese factories running at full steam, it’s easy to forget that at one time, the United States was a leader in the business of making things. Though today it’s hard to find just about anything that still proudly bears the “Made In The U.S.A.” label, the history of the Connecticut River Valley is important to modern manufacturing, and that legacy is still largely apparent in the myriad packaging, machining and tool and die shops that pepper the region. Springfield Technical Community College, another grandchild of the area’s prolific boom during the Industrial Revolution, is among a dwindling number of systemically important institutions—that is, if the U.S. hopes to retain any of what’s left of its manufacturing base or aspires to develop any sort of new one built around biotechnology or alternative energy.
STCC, appropriately, is situated on the grounds of what was once one of the most important and influential manufacturers in American history: the Springfield Armory. The armory, the first established in the newly formed United States, was originally an arsenal situated in Springfield at the recommendation of General George Washington, whose advising officers had all agreed that the location’s strategic value would prove crucial to any future war efforts to defend the nascent country. Its proximity to major crossroads and the Connecticut River made it ideal as a nexus for manufacturing (parts and pieces being easily shipped in and products shipped out in all directions), and its physical situation well inland made it eminently defensible from seagoing enemy warships that could not realistically penetrate some 200 miles of river defenses to reach it. In 1786-87, the Armory survived an assault wherein angry populists led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays attempted to raid the arsenal at Springfield (better known as Shays’ Rebellion). The rebels’ rationale was that they were responding to to what they considered grossly unjust proclamations by Massachusetts courts, who had been legitimizing the taking of men’s lands in lieu of debts owed. After the subsequent defeat of Shays’ forces (an event which did much to promote and establish a federal government), the arsenal was formalized as one of two manufacturing armories in 1794. (The other, destroyed during the Civil War, was at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia).
The Armory, obviously, made (or designed) a lot of weapons in its time, from military sabers and flintlock muskets to revolvers, rifles, carbines, machine guns and other automatic weapons and even large caliber anti-aircraft guns and grenade launchers. Its history of weapons manufacturing and stockpiling is a story in itself, and its military significance is reflected still in the historic site’s annual Armory Day, when re-enactment units hold exercises in cannon-firing and musketry, and the 2nd Continental Dragoons Cavalry hold demonstrations. Also present at Armory Day are historical lecturer/re-enactors who tell stories from the perspectives of the African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” and of the Oneida Indian Nation’s involvement in the Mexican War, the War of 1812 and the Korean War. It’s typically quite a sight if you’re a history buff, or if you just enjoy loud, explosive discharges of gunpowder.
Perhaps less appreciated is the Springfield Armory’s central role in the industrialization of America and the acceleration of the pace of technology’s influence in our everyday lives. Philosophically, it also represents the vexing irony that the economic drivers of war may inevitably have lead to dramatic advances during peacetime that both vastly improved the quality of human life and fueled a regional economy that went on to sustain legions of skilled workers and their families. Some might say that it also represents the beginning of the “military-industrial complex”—and they might be right—but perhaps this phenomenon, while out-of-control in the modern world, was not fully apparent to our forefathers, and so they might be forgiven for their myopic focus on the tasks at hand.
Still, much of their warcraft has since mutated and evolved into what’s now considered indispensable civilian technology. The Armory was responsible for crucial advances in machining processes and equipment such as lathes and die-cutters that made it a fomenter of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. It is both a precursor to the huge modern factories in Detroit and Southern California that mass-produce complex machines like automobiles and supersonic jets and the grandfather of the massive Chinese facilities that make everything from the plates you eat off of to the clothes you wear. One section of the Armory’s museum illustrates the progression of industry from hand-tooling to water power to steam power and finally to electrical power, and its own gunsmithing shops were always on the cutting edge of ergonomic efficiency and production techniques.
The Armory’s history might also be something of a brain short-circuiter to modern proponents of smaller government like the Tea Party; if an actual, primary manufacturer of weaponry was owned by the federal government today, there might be an outbreak of militias challenging it that would eclipse that of Daniel Shays’ rag-tag rebels. At the same time, it’s hard not to appreciate the economic trickle-down effect that the industry (which continued to be owned by the feds until its closing in 1968) had on Springfield, on many surrounding Massachusetts towns and a large swath of Northern Connecticut. Perhaps the primary difference between the Armory and vast, modern private weapons manufacturers is that the scale of both manufacturing operations and global warfare has increased so much that now a man who builds a part for a stealth fighter will likely never see its end use, never know the extent of its lethal potential in any real, visceral way.
But make no mistake: Without modern defense contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing or even the Northampton-based Kollmorgen Electro-Optical, we might have long been without miraculous advances in kidney dialysis, prosthetic body parts or microscopes that have helped us pry open medical mysteries as fruitful as the human genome. We might never have developed life-saving airbags, desperately needed food-producing irrigation systems or spacefaring vehicles that have opened our minds to the possibilities of a larger universe, and so served to unify the race at least a little bit more. In this sense, the panic-driven urgency that only war can inspire may have incidentally furthered the survival of the species while facilitating its self-destruction.
As you watch the cannonballs fly on Armory Day this year, as your children marvel at the power of weaponry and technology wrought to serve the often ambiguous purposes of mankind—or perhaps especially if you’ve made a philosophical choice to not expose them to such things and so left them at home—you might take a moment to reflect upon the implications of that technology and its evolution. Despite the undeniably powerful impetus of war to develop and refine tools and techniques, sometimes its end products can be unexpectedly beneficial.
