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

This is an ambitious book. Creighton University historian Heather Fryer has pulled together four disparate places—Oregon's Klamath Indian Reservation, Topaz (the Japanese-American internment camp), Vanport (a World War II defense-worker housing development), and New Mexico's Los Alamos—dubbed them inverse utopias, "where all the key features of American life were in place but geared to work backwards" (284), and pondered their significance to mid-twentieth century America.

There is a moment early on that illustrates Perimeters of Democracy's great, if not always realized, potential. A Klamath leader, Gordon Bettles, remarks that he had been raised to consider those incarcerated in Topaz, which had been partially carved out of the reservation, as sharing much with his people's history: "if you think about it, the reservation they kept us in was just like internment. We couldn't leave unless we had passes, we couldn't communicate with other tribes" (32). If only the text contained more self-conscious, cross-cultural, first-person reflections about the connections between those who lived within these different federal terrains; such primary-source evidence would have enriched its interpretative agenda and enhanced its persuasive power.

Still, the story Fryer tells is intriguing because it is the first searching assessment of how the federal government molded the West's social landscape during World War II. Happily, she does not limit her analysis to those four turbulent years alone, recognizing that the long view is essential to comprehend the scale and scope of what happened to those who people her study. It was not by happenstance that Japanese Americans were singled out for expulsion from the coastal West and incarceration at sites like Topaz for the duration of hostilities. Fryer, like many other scholars, notes how xenophobia had influenced state and local politics since the mid-nineteenth century, a pattern of hostility that also was manifest in the nation's imperial ambitions. It is no surprise, either, that African Americans who moved to the Pacific Northwest seeking work in defense plants were met with considerable fear. To allay some of these anxieties, federal planners built another kind of reservation, Vanport, sited on a marginal floodplain. Even elite scientists felt the sting of social prejudice or ideological enmity; many Jews and leftists who engineered the nation's atomic arsenal found that living in the secretive Los Alamos facility was anything but democratic. The least convincing narration is about the Klamath Reservation, not because it fails as an example of governmental coercion and deceit, but because its experience with Washington's manipulative behavior long predates Pearl Harbor.

Throughout the book there are some sharp insights about what it meant to inhabit the "plywood settlements" (20) of Topaz, Los Alamos, and Vanport (though more on the spatial pressures and environmental exigencies confronting their inhabitants would have added a much-needed dimension). Fryer also nicely captures how the process of enmification, the profiling of The Other, fed wartime propaganda and the demand for greater domestic surveillance and social control. Yet even this zealotry had its limits. Despite knowing that defense plant workers were doing their part to destroy America's enemies, and that less than 1 percent of them were African American, white residents were enraged that federal housing projects would integrate their neighborhoods. "Not even a threat of an Axis victory," Fryer observes, "could move white Portlanders to renegotiate their racial lines" (68).

But the most troubling irony Perimeters of Democracy explores has continued to haunt our national political culture: in manifold ways, the United States turned some citizens into enemies while fighting "to extend the blessings of American freedom to every corner of the globe" (33).