Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West

2. The Great Citizenship Pantomime: Politics and Power in a Barbed-Wire Democracy

chapter two Politics and Power in a Barbed-Wire Democracy In 1946 War Relocation Authority (wra) officials took stock of their relocation program. The “cultural structure of realistic democracy” spawned a system of homegrown, self-contained political organs that functioned separately from the American body politic, in which fully enfranchised citizens enjoyed real political efficacy. Historian Sandra Taylor, noting the differences between participating in a political exercise and exercising political power, quite aptly called Topaz “a barbedwire democracy.” In a barbed-wire democracy, Japanese detainees were expected to conduct public affairs as if they were living in any American small town, albeit one with a conspicuous, impermeable border. As Reveil Netz notes in Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, barbed wire is not the strongest physical barrier to movement, but it carries a threat of violence in its ability to wound. Tracing the invention of the barbed-wire settlement back to the Boer War and its widespread use to World War I, Netz asserts that such communities were powerful instruments of confining the enemy: containing people in small spaces by surrounding them with instruments of pain placed them under “relentless control.” The politics of this sort of containment is part and parcel of the history of twentieth-century warfare—not of democracy, inclusion, or protection of the vulnerable bodies within.1 84 | The Great Citizenship Pantomime Ideally, the wra’s detainees would accept the government’s fiction of “protective custody” and view their new communities as the western version of the New England towns of the eighteenth century, on which the nation’s political culture of local control and full participation were built. They would elect their own leaders, hold town meetings, and engage in democratic processes to devise solutions to problems, but they would not regain their prewar political rights until the government determined it was safe (to the non-Japanese public) to restore them. To hasten the transformation, the wra would establish “a pattern for government and the improvisation of community institutions within defined concepts of state and federal jurisdiction” that would afford Topazians as much democracy as “circumstances would permit.”2 The most notable difference between small-town America and the barbed-wire democracies was that the federal government’s power to act as parens patriae (“father of the state”) granted the wra “an authority to enforce discipline within a state administrative agency” such as a school, hospital, or prison, where citizens are incapable of acting in their own interest (as determined by the state).3 Despite the authoritarian cast of this political arrangement, the wra truly believed that, if all worked well, the contradictions between the democratic ideal of the small town and the totalizing effects of the prison would mold Japanese outsiders into capable American citizens. One wra staff member mused optimistically in 1942 that “[t]here is an opportunity to share in the accomplishment of a modern miracle . . . the eventual return of every member of the relocated group to their normal place as members of the American Community not only as loyal citizens or resident aliens, but as better citizens, more realistically democratic in principle, in thought, and in effect: tempered . . . to carry forward the living principles of democracy which all of us, in our fashion, are fighting for now.”4 By this logic, the years spent in desolate camps offered just the extended civics lesson that a population so foreign would need to become fit for American citizenship.5 The wra took credit for inventing these limited democracies, but there was nothing new about them; the Indian Bureau had been trying for decades to develop civic structures that were more pedagogical than politically efficacious in order to shape “savage” Indians into capable The Great Citizenship Pantomime | 85 citizens and “competent” individuals. This fantastical reformist impulse had already been enacted at the Klamath Reservation well before Congress formally ratified the Treaty of 1864. Unbeknownst to the Indian signatories of the treaty, their reservation was being designed as a staging area from which Agent Lindsay Applegate, with the aid of his son Oliver, could judge each tribal member’s loyalty to the United States. At the Indian Bureau, “loyalty” meant compliance with government directives, not devotion to American principles of freedom, equality, and democracy per se. Applegate absorbed the bureau’s definition in his policies. For instance, he considered any Indian “not living in the place or places designated for them by treaty...