Milo Minderbinder - Literary Significance

Literary Significance

Joseph Heller intentionally seeded Catch 22 with "anachronisms like loyalty oaths, helicopters, IBM machines and agricultural subsidies", all of which only appear in the McCarthy-Era, in order to create a more contemporary atmosphere. Likewise, Heller created Minderbinder's famous saying "What's good for Milo Minderbinder, is good for the country" (insert Syndicate or M&M Enterprises for Milo Minderbinder) as a parody of Charles E. Wilson, who said "What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country" during a hearing of a Senate subcommittee in 1952. Wilson was the head of General Motors in 1952, but became Secretary of Defense in January 1953, thus being an early example of the military-industrial complex, which the Minderbinder character well represents.

According to Heller, he modelled the character traits of Minderbinder - fast-talking, self-promoting, thoroughly conscienceless - after his Coney Island childhood friend Marvin Winkler (or Beansy to friends). Winkler is described at length in Heller's 1998 memoir Now and Then.

Milo Minderbinder has become the archetypal unabashed war profiteer in the American novel, better known than the first example of the species, the character Charles Holt in the 1863 novel The Days of Shoddy by Henry Morford, and the later characters Marcus Hubbard in the play Another Part of the Forest, Joe Keller in the Miller play All My Sons and Noah Rosewater in the Vonnegut novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.