American Rifle - Alexander Rose [126]
Businessmen irritated by Ordnance’s smugness, on the other hand, pointed out that all those lucrative foreign arms contracts streaming in were not for Springfields and armory-produced ammunition but for Remingtons, Winchesters, and the little products of the Union Metallic Cartridge company. For them, Benét’s comeuppance was the delicious climax to a long-running fight between private firms and the government.
From the 1870s onward major and minor gun-makers alike, to take on the Ordnance monolith, had formed themselves into the Association of Manufacturers of Arms, Ammunition and Equipment. To its members’ collective mind, only the association’s intense lobbying efforts had obliged Ordnance to allow Winchesters, Remingtons, Lees, Hotchkisses, and so forth into its weapons trials to compete against the department’s precious Springfield. The president of the Whitney Arms Company, Eli Whitney, Jr.—the son of the Whitney who invented the cotton gin—acted as the association’s spokesman and went so far as to say in 1878 that had the government taken the “millions of dollars that have been spent upon the National Armories” and diverted it to the private sector, then the United States would today be “the best armed country in the world.” The entire armory system should be shuttered, he argued, and its budget parceled out among association members.
The association’s criticism of Ordnance for favoring its own weapon could be justified, but its proposal to terminate all government arms production and research in order to scoop up its appropriations was too patently self-interested for most congressmen to stomach. The whole affair appeared to be an effort by manufacturers to shore up their own failing businesses at the expense of the government. (Confirming these suspicions, Whitney’s company would be liquidated in 1888, the same year in which Remington was divided up between Marcellus Hartley’s United Metallic Company and Winchester.) It was no great surprise, then, that the association’s campaign in the late 1870s to privatize the arms business was quashed.22
Times had changed by 1890. Thanks to the smokeless-powder debacle, to Lee’s immensely profitable defection to the British with his rejected, superb rifle, and to continuing French and German weapons advances, Ordnance could no longer lord it over private makers and was compelled to plea humbly for its profit-making rivals to help save American face.
The arms-maker Maxim and the black-powder producer Du Pont, as well as the Belgian Wetteren company, were among the first to present their wares to Ordnance. None were wholly satisfactory: Maxim’s could be loaded into the cartridge only one grain at a time, Wetterin’s smelled disconcertingly of pineapple when fired, and Du Pont’s was difficult to load because it was cut into rectangles. These defects could soon be rectified, but more seriously, none of the competitors had succeeded in making a powder as powerful as that used by the French. On average, their powders propelled a bullet at 1,700 feet per second, faster than regular black powder could, but the army had stipulated at least 2,000.23
Ordnance, however, was not entirely down for the count. In 1892 the department successfully lobbied for funds to establish a chemical laboratory at Frankford Arsenal, the government’s traditional center of ammunition manufacturing. By the end of 1893 what might be called the cooperative competition