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

Perimeters of Democracy assembles four case studies of communities planned, controlled, and eventually disbanded or abandoned by the federal government: the Klamath Indian Reservation, established in 1864; Vanport, a community built for shipyard workers in Portland, Oregon, in 1942; Topaz, one of ten "relocation centers" for Japanese Americans built after Executive Order 9066; and Los Alamos, the civilian enclave and secret site of atomic research in northern New Mexico built in 1943. Fryer argues that each community represents a fearful, short-lived official response to a real or perceived foreign threat on the home front; once the danger passed, the community was dissolved and its residents displaced once again, left to re-assimilate into mainstream society. She terms the communities "inverse utopias" to bring out their structural contradictions: although guided by fictions of freedom and equality at the center of US democracy, each "inverse utopia" ironically produced dependency, deepened disparities in economic and legal status, and contributed to social instability—the very opposite of what the government intended.

While even a comparison of two towns with diverse histories might have brought out surprising commonalities, Fryer's more ambitious method illuminates important contrasts in class, race, and cultural identification. "Instead of flattening these political, economic, and social histories," she chooses to place them "within a single constellation that captures the broad context of this collective history" (4). The book draws on an impressive array of archival and print sources, as well as oral histories and interviews, to bring each of these communities to life and into relation with one another.

While some aspects of the study will undoubtedly be familiar to western American literary scholars, many of the book's well-researched details seem newly relevant, and its strategies of juxtaposition and collective storytelling succeed in constructing a complex social history. For example, Fryer sets up parallels between the territorial conflicts waged among American and British colonizers and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest that led to the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the creation of the Klamath Indian Reservation, and the region's racial politics after Pearl Harbor. Together these stories establish a foundation for the book's larger argument about how an identified "Other" was repeatedly cast as an internal enemy and proved that "the combination of national security objectives and social progress made it harder, instead of easier, for Indians to be peaceful and loyal to the United States" (43). The economic struggles, educational programs, housing conditions, poor food, and lack of legal protection are also vividly described and illustrated with archival photographs for each community, confirming the "tragic ironies" of everyday life.

By organizing the chapters according to theme, Fryer succeeds in weaving together the strands of her subject and arriving at a coherent conclusion: the claim that policies based on fear compromise individual rights of citizens and resident aliens, a point especially pertinent to current immigration debates.

Several key figures (such as Wade Crawford, the first Native superintendent of the Klamath tribe, and Minoru Kiyota, the fearless student activist at Topaz) speak eloquently through Fryer's text, but at times the book's arrangement results in unnecessary repetition of an issue across the four communities. If Fryer had allowed some issues to resonate more deeply in a single community or given several figures a larger role to play, she might have created a book with more memorable stories, as well as the one she did admirably produce: a thorough and clearly argued history of some of the twentieth-century West's most deeply lived contradictions.