Home

Seymour Melman, 86, Dies; Spurred Antiwar Movement

by JENNIFER BAYOT, December 18, 2004

Seymour Melman, a Columbia University scholar who helped galvanize the antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of military spending, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause appeared to be an aneurysm, said Benjamin Abrams, his research assistant.

Dr. Melman, an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, was a leading advocate of disarmament for nearly half a century. He opposed nuclear weapons almost from their inception and he opposed the current war in Iraq.

A longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, he emphasized arguments that military spending diverted resources from health care, public housing and education.

In speeches, editorials, scholarly articles and close to a dozen books, he criticized the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and maintained that the United States and the Soviet Union were draining their economies for little more than the ability to destroy each other hundreds of times over. He popularized the use of the word "overkill" to describe thebuildup. "Isn't 1,250 times overkill enough?" he wrote in a 1964 letter to The New York Times. "Since the Soviets by similar calculation can overkill the United States only 145 times, are we to believe that any advantage exists here for either side?"

He rebutted a post-World War II argument that war drove the economy, maintaining that the opposite was true and that other factors helped pull the country out of the Depression.

In his 1974 book, "The Permanent War Economy," he composed a long list of military trade-offs. The money spent on one Huey helicopter, he said, could buy 66 low-priced homes, while a recent $69 million reduction in child-nutrition programs represented the cost of two DE-1052 destroyer escorts. He added, "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program."

"His work changed the debate in the peace movement to much broader issues," said Marcus Raskin, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal research institute, and an adviser to the National Security Council in the Kennedy administration.

Professor Melman's arguments appealed to a wide spectrum, attracting unions like the United Automobile Workers and the Machinists Union as well as public advocates like Ralph Nader, who yesterday described Prof. Melman's studies as "prescient for decades."

Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and antiwar activist, said Dr. Melman helped mobilize what once was weak and scattered resistance to war and other military operations.

"The country is a lot different than it was 30 to 40 years ago, and he had a big role in that," Mr. Chomsky said. "There's much more widespread opposition to the diversion of resources to military production, to the use of force in international affairs, to nuclear development."

Dr. Melman became an authority on a process called "economic conversion," the retooling of arms factories and military bases for civilian purposes. He outlined such plans in "The Demilitarized Society" (1988) and "Rebuilding America" (1992). He advised the United Nations on the possibilities of economic conversion from 1979 to 1980, and from 1988 on, he was chairman of The National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament.

Seymour Melman was born in the Bronx on Dec. 30, 1917. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from College of the City of New York in 1939.

After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he received a doctorate in economics from Columbia, where he was later chairman of the industrial engineering department.

His books on military spending include "Our Depleted Society" (1965), "Pentagon Capitalism" (1970) and "Profits Without Production" (1983).

His more recent books, including "After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Economy" (2001), describe the potential of employee self-management, an idea that interested him for decades. As a young man, he briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel, and later in his career participated in studies and meetings on the productivity of such collective settlements.

Dr. Melman is survived by a brother, Myron, of Rehovot, Israel. His marriage to JoAnne Medalie ended in divorce.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ralph Nader on Seymour Melman
by Ralph Nader, December 20, 2004

Published by CommonDreams.org

In the rarified world of economics and industrial engineering, there was never anyone like Columbia University professor Seymour Melman. I grew up reading and listening to the prophetic, factual and hard-nosed arguments he made for his anti-war and worldwide disarmament causes in the specialized and, occasionally, the major media as well.

There were Seymour Melman's op-eds and letters to the editor in the New York Times starting in his twenties. There were his cogent Congressional testimonies about the permanent war economy and its damage to our civilian economy and necessities of the American people. His economic conversion plans and his advocacy for a muscular peace agreement with the Soviet Union illuminated what kind of economy, innovation and prosperity could be ours in the U.S.A.

Melman's work was detailed and he challenged what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" like that of no other academic. He would show how talented scientific and engineering skills were sucked into this permanent war economy to the detriment of civilian jobs and economic development as if people's well-being mattered. "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program," he would say, referring to Lockheed Martin's chronically bungled, defective and costly contract.

Melman's consulting services were in great demand. His numerous books made such sense to people for whom foresight was a valued attitude. He advised citizen groups, unions, legislators and the United Nations. For years he was chairman of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament.

Into his eighties, Mr. Melman probed the arcane regions of weapons systems. He meticulously took apart the wrong ways the corporate-dominated Pentagon priced the corporate cost of subs, ships, planes and other modern weaponry, by way of explaining the staggering spiral of weapon budgets.

The titles of his books spoke to his concerns - "Our Depleted Society," "Pentagon Capitalism" and "Profits Without Production". As a World War II veteran, he knew the difference between an adequate defense and weaponry "overkill". He calculated that US nuclear weapons had the power to destroy the Soviet Union 1,250 times over. He asked, how much is too much of a drain on our economy and well-being?

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the agreement on dismantling many of those nuclear warheads on both sides, Mr. Melman looked forward to the "peace dividends" and the economic conversion or retooling he so long urged. It was not to happen. The military budget now consumes half of the entire federal government's operating expenditures.

In his later years, Melman promoted the idea of self-management as an alternative to giant corporations. For the last twenty years the media blacked him out. He could scarcely get an article published in the newspapers or even in the progressive magazines. On frenetic radio and television, he did not qualify because he spoke in paragraphs and was
elderly - an electronic bigotry that is keeping many wise, older Americans from communicating with their younger generations.

It was precisely because he had been so right again and again that print media tired of his research even though it was up to date. How many Americans know, for example, that 90% of the products sold in the 2002 L.L. Bean catalogue were imported? He counted them, to make his point about the de-industrialization of America.

How many people would want to know that a recent New York City contract for mass transit vehicles received only foreign bidders? Not one American company was there to compete and provide the jobs for the $3 billion dollar project.

Before he passed away this month, Seymour Melman had completed a concise book manuscript titled, "Wars, Ltd.: The Rise and Fall of America's Permanent War Economy". He was having trouble finding a good publisher, when I spoke with him earlier this summer.

But he will leave a legacy of wisdom, insight, humanity, consistency, and diligence. In a society whose rulers and corporatists seal the people off from such magnificent minds and inundate them with trivia, distraction and the hot air artists daily bellowing their lucrative ignorance, sagacious Americans like Seymour Melman will not receive the attention the citizenry deserves unless we the people, who own the public airwaves, begin to control and use our own media rights

For more information, visit www.citizenworks.org