The Tailings of Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy.

Start with manganese (Mn). There is plenty of bioavailable manganese in the U.S. west, but in part because Malone mostly lost his bid to support extensive domestic manganese mining, it is less associated with the region's mines than it is with smelting and milling sites like those of the Sharon Steel Company's Salt Lake City, Utah facility - a Superfund site contaminated with, among other things, high levels of manganese almost certainly mined abroad.[89] The geography of manganese helps to underscore Walker's, LeCain's, and Murphy's contentions about the historical nature of toxic exposures, and it is worth thinking more broadly about the overlaps between historical thinking and epidemiology alongside the story of George Malone and the President's Materials Policy Commission in the early Cold War. Increasingly pugnacious over his short Senatorial career (a champion boxer, Malone would nearly come to blows with a British diplomat at an official state dinner in 1956), Malone also harbored a special, almost visceral loathing of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson.[70] What makes Malone particularly interesting, however, is the extent to which he rooted his opposition to internationalist foreign policy in a providential, isolationist resource ideology. Manganese is not only good for making steel; manganese and strategic minerals like it are also good for making sense out of the past, and about the material and ideological relationships between the past and the present.[2] This paper uses these two conflicting viewpoints on strategic minerals like manganese - Paley's and Malone's - to investigate the relationships among resource management, political ideology, foreign policy, and conceptions of nature during the early Cold War. [Extracted from the article]