Northampton is home to an L3Harris facility, one of more than a hundred around the globe. It sits quietly, inconspicuously on prime real estate in a mostly residential neighborhood, directly across from the upscale Village Hill development on Route 66.
Headquartered in Florida, L3Harris is the sixth largest weapons contractor in the world. And one of its facilities is right here, in our small city — a city renown for its activists and activism, as a bastion for progressive, anti-war, peace and justice, and LGBTQ politics.
I’ve been trying to understand how it manages to stay under the radar, more-or-less undisturbed. Their business, after all, is to manufacture and profit from the very goods and services that enable the brutal wars, occupation and oppression so many of us oppose.
L3Harris isn’t exactly a household name, like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. A household name for some of us would be Kollmorgen, and perhaps that’s where I’ll start. Kollmorgen was, well, local, with a history of progressive workplace politics that helped soften their profile. Good Wood’s lanky center-fielder in the 1980s, Stuart Crocker, a man with an incredible reach and fast legs, was a machinist at Kollmorgen, a union steward who was pretty positive about the job, the salary and benefits.
Kollmorgen, begun in 1916 and incorporated as Kollmorgen Optical in 1924, was founded in New York City by German emigre, Friedrich Kollmorgan, to make periscopes for U.S. submarines. It moved to Northampton in 1951. Its fortunes — literally — rose and fell as the country and the world lurched from hot war to cold, from stability to instability.
Like any small company, it had to diversify, change and expand with changing times and changing needs. There were mergers and acquisitions that positioned it solidly in the forefront of high-performance motion control systems and electro-optical equipment. The company was featured in 100 Best Companies to Work for in America in 1984. Nevertheless, it struggled through the recession of the 1980s only to be rescued by increasing military contracts going into the 1990s — $50million in 1993.
Still, in a publication celebrating 100 years (1916-2016), Kollmorgen listed a range of other-than-military accomplishments, including their involvement in critical applications on every Space Shuttle mission and the left ventricular assist device (LVAD), a surgically implanted battery-operated mechanical pump-type device that enables the heart to pump when it can’t work on its own.
This was the company that moved from King Street to its current location, the local company that employed the wide-ranging center fielder from our co-ed softball team. There was some push back from city residents who wanted to save and repurpose the historic State Hospital building on that site. And neighbors had concerns about a large industrial facility in their backyards.
But local officials wanted Kollmorgen to stay in Northampton; it was the largest (at the time) industrial employer and taxpayer. And so opposition and questions were pushed aside, a deal was struck, and they moved.
Within a year, in December 2011, Kollmorgen was bought, by L3 Communications, “ … a contractor in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, command, control, communications, aircraft modernization and maintenance, and sustainment of aircraft, maritime vessels and ground vehicles, and national security solutions. … a producer of a broad range of electronic systems used in military and commercial platforms,” with 61,000 employees around the world.
The company had more than 21 serious misconduct charges against it, ranging from over-billing to genocide, and fines from those charges amounting to $139,589,466, according to POGO, the Project on Government Oversight.
And then in June 2019, in one of the largest defense contracting mergers in history, L3 Communications merged with Harris Corporation, a move that positioned the new company, L3Harris, in the top tier of contractors— number six in the world, a $33.5 billion military technology giant. While this was a big deal in the corporate/military establishment I would say it went almost unnoticed by most people in Northampton.
Kollmorgen won its first government contract — for two submarine periscopes — in 1916 in the midst of World War I. While they produced other things, the company’s survival and long-term success depended, in the end, on war — hot wars and cold wars. Its survival depended on the powerful political/military/industrial/media culture that emerged after the two world wars, a post-war culture that realized war was more profitable than peaceful coexistence.
President Dwight Eisenhower laid it out — the history and challenges for a small company like “our” Kollmorgen and for our country — in his farewell speech to the nation (1961). “ … the solitary inventor tinkering in his shop (in our case, Friedrich Kollmorgan),” he said, had been replaced by something new in America — an arms industry.
Millions of Americans had gone to work in the emerging military contracting industry, turning plowshares into swords in response to two world wars. Their livelihood and the company’s financial success depended, for the first time, on government contracts. And, he added, government contracts had reached into universities funding research and threatening “… free ideas and scientific discovery…”
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry… This total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — was,” Eisenhower said, “felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government …” And then he issued his famous warning to “… guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
And persist it does, as he warned it would, aggregating and metastasizing like a cancer, enabled by a revolving door of people of “unwarranted influence” who shuffle, unrestrained, between the military/industrial/media complex and seats of government power that promote and benefit from war and militarism.
Planet earth, like a cancer patient, faces catastrophe every day, catastrophes exacerbated and/or created by militarism and, by bloated military budgets that leave people, organizations and institutions outside this “complex” without the human and financial resources needed to sustain and improve lives and life on the planet.
The horse, as they say, has left the barn, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to realize a better world. It means we have to try harder.
That’s what one of Northampton’s most celebrated activists, Frances Crowe, would say. She died two years ago on Aug. 27. One of her signs famously asked: Does our lifestyle depend on war? The answer weighs heavily on me, in light of what I’m writing here. If we want a different world and a different future, I think we have to ask ourselves some difficult questions about an economy and a local industry that — as Code Pink says — makes a killing on killing.
Written by Claudia Lefko with input from Chelsea Faria and Miranda Giroux, co-chair Demilitarize Western Mass campaign, and others. To get involved: iraqichildrensart@gmail.com