Politics in the Round

The rifle is an instrument of politics, and Alexander Rose’s new book, American Rifle: A Biography, is a study in the realpolitik of pushing lead. Beginning with the rifle’s early days in the capitalistic ferment of colonial Pennsylvania’s German enclaves and progressing through the M16’s challenges in Iraq, Rose has written one the most interesting nonfiction books of the year.

Rose begins with a portrait of George Washington — literally, with Charles Willson Peale’s painting of the father of our country: Washington’s middle-aged body is squeezed into a tailored uniform dating from his youth. Along with the details of his uniform, Washington made sure that the painting included his rifle, most likely the bespoke John Jost piece he commissioned for the princely sum of 6 pounds, 10 shillings, in 1770. The rifle, distinct from the muskets of the time, would have been considered a newfangled contraption. Washington’s conspicuous consumption foreshadows the great themes that would thereafter attend Americans’ attitudes toward firearms: our national passion for technological innovation, our tradition of military excellence, our lust for firearms as tokens of status (Cheney had his famous shooting mishap with a $25,000 Italian masterpiece), and our understanding of ourselves as a revolutionary nation, founded in ideals made real by deeds of arms. It was General Washington, not Farmer George, who shaped the American presidency.

The rifle wasn’t invented in America — the first experiments in “rifling,” cutting grooves inside musket barrels to impart an accuracy-increasing spin to the bullet, were made in 15th-century Germany — but it was here that the weapon evolved into its modern form. Immigrant gunsmiths found themselves exiled from Quaker Philadelphia, which judged these artisans a threat to brotherly love. They settled around Lancaster, where they enjoyed easy access to materials and a steady stream of westward-bound travelers in need of arms. The American rifle they developed was named not for the place of its manufacture but for the destination of the men carrying it: The “Kentucky rifle,” distinguished by its long barrel and consequent accuracy, became an emblem of American life, at least in what were then the red states. Rose reports that there were rifle shops in Baltimore, Alexandria, Cumberland, Charlotte, and Augusta, but not a single rifle dealer east of the Hudson.

The Kentucky rifle shaped American military tactics from the Revolution forward. The American ideal of the soldier is a democratic and entrepreneurial one: a semi-autonomous sharpshooter integrated into a disciplined command structure but capable of a wide range of independent action. The musket was suited to the rigidity of European warfare, with its aristocratic commanders and disciplined lines. The rifle enabled the light and fast precision tactics that remain familiar to students of American warfare today.

Rose tells a long and complex story tied together by broad ideological themes, but this book is no scholarly trudge. It is packed with fascinating anecdotes — e.g., the urine of dipsomaniacs was a coveted ingredient in gunpowder manufacturing — and keen insights into the nexus of civilian politics, business, and the military.

And there is no shortage of scoundrels in this tale. America’s first real modern military rifle, the Springfield M1903, paid covert tribute to the industry’s German roots by violating patents owned by Waffenfabrik Mauser and Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, the great German armorers. Ironically, the rifles that U.S. troops would carry against Germany in two world wars were made possible by back-room deals after the fact by William Crozier, the army ordnance chief who negotiated royalty payments to the Germans after it became clear that the M1903 designers had ripped off the Kaiser. (Who could blame them? You want a soufflé, call the French; you want to kill people with a great deal of precision, dial Berlin.) The Germans must wish they’d cut a better deal on those royalties.

Crozier is a study in the politics of the progressive era. When Teddy Roosevelt wanted to make him the army’s ordnance chief, Crozier was a mere captain — and by law the job required nothing less than a lieutenant colonel. Roosevelt and secretary of war Elihu Root, determined to refashion the army in accordance with the teachings of “scientific management” guru Frederick Taylor, simply gave Captain Crozier a promotion — to brigadier general — and installed him in the job. Like many of the great progressives, Crozier was a mathematician and technician; he had designed an artillery carriage shortly after being graduated from West Point. His first order of business as head of ordnance was overseeing the design of a modern rifle with which to arm Root’s modern army. He would find that politics, not ballistics, is the dominant consideration in developing a new military rifle. Lincoln had suffered the same problem when he wanted modern breech-loaders for the army, only to have his desires frustrated by the officious ordnance chief James Ripley, who resisted innovations that did not originate within his own bureaucracy. Ripley had once refused to fulfill a requisition for Gen. Andrew Jackson, who in turn promised to hang him; Lincoln took a politic approach and eventually got what he wanted. Repeatedly, Rose finds, arms development has been dominated by politics rather than the mandate to put the best rifle available into soldiers’ hands. Inevitably, that leads him to the live controversy over the M16 rifle and its runty carbine cousin, the M4.

The M16, an American icon, became our national rifle almost by accident. That accident was called the Vietnam War. First put into action by the Kennedy administration for “specialized” use — all those “advisers” in Vietnam — the M16 appeared at the right time: Springfield Armory’s contract for its predecessor, the M14, was coming to a close, and the Pentagon’s development geniuses had just abandoned a risible flop known as the “Special Purposes Individual Weapon,” which was never manufactured. America’s commitment to the M16 was a result of our commitment to Vietnam — we had a war and needed a rifle with which to fight it. The “space age” M16 is the Mac of assault rifles, revolutionary in both materials and design, and originally developed by a garage startup in California. And just as earlier innovations had been resisted, the M16 found its foe in young Sen. Edward Kennedy, who understood nothing about rifles but knew how many people were employed by Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. The needs of President Kennedy’s war ultimately trumped the needs of Senator Kennedy’s pork-barreling.

The M16/M4 has its critics, chief among them Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is skeptical of the weapon and of Colt, currently the exclusive provider for the American military. Rose touches on the disputes regarding the lethality of the M16’s round, a small one based on the .22-caliber rifle cartridge and dismissed by its critics as the “poodle-shooter,” but he gives insufficient attention to the real concern: that it is not up to the task of putting down enemies protected by the high-tech body armor that is slowly making its way to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other battlegrounds. The future of the M16 is unknown, but Rose reports that just as Vietnam brought the M16 into service, Iraq is helping to ensure that it remains on duty: With the M16 having replaced the ghastly old AK-47 as Iraq’s standard rifle, the Pentagon is hesitant, for both political and logistical reasons, to make the move to a new rifle and a new round. The American rifle isn’t only an instrument of politics, but an object of politics, too.