Resources for Freedom?: Nature, Nation, and Strategic Minerals in the Early Cold War

• In Event: The Nature of American Foreign Relations: Taking Foreign Relations History and Environmental History Together

Abstract

In 1951, Harry Truman commissioned former CBS executive William Paley to lead a study assessing the country’s material resource needs in the coming decades. Released in 1952, the Commission’s Resources for Freedom cataloged the use, geographical distribution, and availability of key elements like manganese, copper, chrome, tungsten, and lead, essentially redefining the nation’s strategic priorities in the naturalized technocratic terms of the periodic table.

The Commission presented Resources for Freedom as a politically neutral document, but almost immediately, it generated controversy. In particular, the Paley Commission’s conclusions about the need for freer trade and mineral stockpiles awakened resistance from a group of Mountain West Republicans with important interests in the domestic mining industry. Led in part by an unpredictable Senator from Nevada named George Malone, this group defended the economic and political interests of their constituents by appealing to a long-standing myth of providential American natural abundance, arguing that the Paley Commission had overlooked the mineral bounty of a continent that simply needed more mining development to meet its vast potential and reclaim its role as the seat of American power. At the same time, these same conservative politicians subscribed to an equally “American” narrative of natural vulnerability that reinforced the strategic imperative of strong American foreign influence to contain the threat of communism.

This paper will use the controversy over the Paley Commission report to investigate how American policymakers incorporated narratives about nature and concerns about natural resources into their assessment of America’s strategic priorities during the early Cold War. What can the Paley Commission episode tell us about the interplay between economic and strategic concerns about material resources, on the one hand, and longstanding cultural ideas about nature and American identity in the 1950s on the other?

Author

• Joshua Howe, Reed College